Remembering

by Wendell Berry

  At the top of the hill the Fairmont is brightly lighted. The pavement in front has just been washed, and the lights shine in the wet. Andy stops on the corner to look. He would like to go into the lobby and see it, opulent and empty so early in the morning. He almost does so, and then stops, remembering himself: a one-handed man, unshaven and carelessly dressed. He does not want some elegant-mannered doorman or clerk to ask him, “May I help you?” He stands and looks and goes by, and on across the hilltop and onto the downward slant of the street. Behind him a robin is singing in the foliage of one of the cropped sycamores in front of the Pacific Union, and he can hear a street sweeper whistling prettily over the harsh strokes of his broom.

  There are trees now, here and there along the street, their crowns dark. As he passes under one of them a bird begins to sing in it, a complex lyric sung as if forgotten all through the night and now remembered. Now wherever trees are, singing is in them. Where the buildings are the city is, and is quiet. Where the trees are the world is, and a sweet worldsong is singing itself in the dark.

  He is a walker in the dark, excluded from the songs around him.

  Taxis are creeping along the empty streets almost silently, like beasts of prey. A baby cries, and high in a dark wall to his left a window is suddenly lighted. At the corner of Jackson Street he stops while a noisy Volkswagen bus pauses at the intersection, but when the bus shifts gears and goes on, Andy continues to stand still, looking down Jackson at the bay. He can see the lights of the Bay Bridge stepping out into the air above the dark water. He can hear the cable car machinery humming under the street. A man in a hooded shirt, walking a dog, crosses Jackson and goes on up the hill, his steps echoing in the quiet. Andy is filled with a yearning toward this place. He imagines himself living here. He would have a small apartment up here on the hillside, a cliff dwelling, looking out over the bay. He would live alone, and slowly he would come to know a peacefulness and gentleness in his own character, having nobody to quarrel with. He would have a job that he could walk to in the morning and walk home from in the evening. It would be a job that would pay him well and give him nothing to worry about before he went to it or after he left it. In his spare time he would visit the museums. He would dress well and eat well. He would learn Japanese and spend his vacations in Japan. He would become a student of Japanese culture and art. He would bring back pottery and paintings. His apartment would be a place of refuge, quiet and orderly, full of beautiful things. In his travels he would meet beautiful, indolent, slow-speaking women as solitary and independent as himself, who would not wish to know him well.

  But he reminds himself of himself. Something else in him is raging at him: “Damn you! Damn you!” And he says then lucidly to his mind, “Yes, you sorry fool, be still!” For the flaw in all that dream is himself, the little hell of himself alone.

  You fool. You sorry fool.

  The cable hums under the street. The bridge swings its great stride out into the dark. Now the city parcels itself out in his hearing: the hum of the cable almost underfoot, and in the distance the hum of the night-waking of the whole city. Except for those sounds near and far, for the moment it is quiet, and he can hear the birds singing wherever there are trees. The birds brood or dream over their song, as if the song knows of the coming light that the birds have not yet suspected. The time is neither night nor morning.

  He reminds himself of himself.

  He walks again, crossing on Jackson to Powell, and turning again northward. The names on windows and awnings are in Chinese now. The street reeks with the smell of yesterday’s fish.

  A figure lurches upright out of a doorway ahead of him. The man is bearded, long-haired, his head bound with a rolled bandanna. He wears a fringed buckskin coat.

  “Hey, man!”

  “Hello!”

  “Say, brother, could you spare me a buck for a little breakfast?”

  Andy feels in his pocket, finding, if he is not mistaken, two nickels and a quarter. “I thought the toll was a dime.”

  “This ain’t 1930, man.”

  “Well, when is it?”

  “How would I know? Later?”

  Am I going to show this fellow my wallet?

  Holding his wallet in his one hand, he will be disarmed.

  “I mean, a good breakfast, man, that’s a good start on a good day.” The man is chanting, dancing a little, as if to a rhythm independent of himself that might carry him abruptly up the street, empty-handed.

  Do I even have a dollar bill? Is this charity or madness?

  Madness or charity, he holds his wallet against his waist with his right forearm, and with his left hand plucks out a bill, and it is a five, and another, and it is a one; on impulse, he gives them both.

  “Oh, wow! Far out! Thanks, Tex. You a man of a better time.”

  So would I hope, if I hoped, to pray to be.

  When he has crossed Broadway he can see the lights of the westward tower of the Bay Bridge centered in the opening of the street, the lights of its cables swaying down symmetrically on either side. Above a dark cloudbank in the east, a pale light is in the sky. The traffic along Broadway is thin but constant, its sound established, the day begun.

  A walker in the dark, he feels the touch of the light of the sky around him, but he is not in it. He reminds himself of himself.

  In Washington Square, the trees are loud with the cries of sparrows. The little park is an island, green, tree-shaded under the lights; on the far side is the lighted pale front of the church of Peter and Paul. Andy sits down on a bench in the shadows near the firemen’s monument. The sparrows clamor overhead. Lighted buses go by, the people inside them sleepy and quiet, on their way to work; as the buses move and stop, the people sway in unison in their seats, unresisting as underwater weeds. Joggers pass, striding long, their breathing loud over their footfalls. A dog passes slowly, his short legs trotting fast. A fat Chinese woman walks by, swinging her arms vigorously. Behind her comes a Chinese man slowly rotating his extended arms as if he is a sluggish seabird preparing to fly.

  Now Andy can see daylight in all the sky, brighter to the east, although, below, the lights of the streets are still strong and the shadows dark. He sits and watches. He watches the slow waking of the streets, the gentle people exercising in the park, their movements as fluent and quiet as if dreamed. He watches the lights around the square become weak as the sky brightens. On the bench next to him a man is lying asleep under a blanket. In all the stirring in the square, they two are the only ones who are still. When the daylight has come well into the shadows and the night has entirely gone, he gets up; he stands in front of the church and reads the legend engraved across its face: LA GLORIA DI COLUI CHE TUTTO MUOVE PER L’UNIVERSO PENETRA E RISPLENDE.

  GOOD EARTH REALTY, INC., and all the rest of the businesses along Columbus Avenue are still shut, dreaming perhaps of opportunities to come later. In their dreams their mouths are open, and people are rushing in with their pockets full of money. There is nothing like a crowd yet in the gray light of the street. The walkers, some going to work, some going to breakfast, some led by little dogs, appear one at a time, widely dispersed, moved along by singular and undetectable purposes.

  What draws him to the sleeper in the doorway, he does not know. He sees the man lying there, his knees drawn up beneath a short piece of blanket that does not cover his feet, and he stops. He stops, perhaps, because of some suggestion of the power of his awareness over the man sleeping unaware. The man, Andy sees, is young, his face unlined under his three days’ growth of beard. His hair is blond, his beard red. His head is resting on his extended right arm, the forearm propped at the wrist against the kick plate of the door, the hand relaxed and drooping like the bloom of a nodding flower. The hand, like the blanket, is dirty. The young man’s mouth is slightly open. He has the innocent look of a sleeping child. And what can have brought him here?

  Andy leans, looking at the young man face-to-face. The young man is loosened and easy in his sleep, in h
is vulnerability unaware, as if in some absolute trust that to Andy is not imaginable. The sleeper has entrusted himself to his defenseless sleep as confidently as a little child to his own bed at home. As if not with his mind but with his shoulder and breastbone, Andy recalls his grandfather’s old fingers prodding him through the covers. “Boy? The sun’s up.” And then, in pity and sorrow: “And you still a-laying in the bed with the daylight in your face.” And Andy thinks of himself leaning over his own sleeping son. For a moment he is almost breathless with the thought that if he reached out and touched this man, he would move; he would stir and wake out of his dark sleep to live in this new day that has come.

  But now singing is in the street, and Andy moves away. A man is coming up the street, singing an aria in a fine, strong tenor. As he moves along he is inspecting the interiors of garbage cans, as unfailing in his attentions as a postman. As they meet and pass, the man does not look at Andy. He seems to be aware of nothing in the world but his quest from garbage can to garbage can. He seems not to hear himself singing.

  “No,” Andy thinks. “Maybe it was not absolute trust. Maybe it was absolute despair. Maybe when he lay down he didn’t care if he slept or died.” Andy lays his hand on his breastbone as a chill or an ache passes through him and shakes him. He reminds himself of himself.

  He is down in the flat now, close to the bay. At intersections he can see Alcatraz with its walls, its lighthouse flashing. A nice gentle-faced woman is waiting at a bus stop alone. Andy says before he thinks, as if in Port William, “Morning!” The woman quickly looks away. Her fear and accusation are in the air around her, leaving him hardly room to pass.

  But momentum is going with him now. He is almost outside the network of the streets. And then, at the foot of Hyde Street, he is out of it and is standing in the great fall of dawnlight over the bay and its islands, the Golden Gate, the Marin hills and Mount Tamalpais beyond. To the east, beyond the Berkeley hills, the whiteness of the sky has begun to show a faint stain of pink. The air opens and lightens around him, freshening, bearing the cold pungence of the ocean. Seagulls, crying hungrily, circle on spread wings in the unobstructed day.

  In Aquatic Park a little lilting surf is running up the beach, the tide going out, and gulls are walking with strange terrestrial flat-footedness among the windrows of drift and trash and seaweed. Andy goes along the curved walk above the harbor into the lee of the high ground of Fort Mason where the air is still and he can smell the eucalyptus trees.

  The long pier curves out ahead of him into the bay. He is going over water now. A few fishermen are already leaning on the parapet, watching their lines, which disappear beneath the little waves. The fishermen are already dazzled with expectation and the motion of the water. As Andy stands and watches, a rod tip suddenly vibrates and gestures downward.

  A little farther out he encounters suddenly the wind off the sea, pressing in massively and steadily past the bridge. The gulls go against it, and turn, their wings spread to it in overmastering grace; their voices skitter and quarrel over tidbits of garbage or the possible future occurance of tidbits of garbage. Out toward Alcatraz seven pelicans are flying in stately single file. Westward, the great bridge stands aloof, its tower tops hidden in fog, and out beyond it the immense tremor of the ocean. Fishing boats are coming in from the night. Gulls standing on the parapets of the pier call softly, and then for no apparent reason break into laughter.

  Andy walks and stands and walks until he comes to the outermost arc of the pier. There, with the whole continent at his back, nothing between him and Asia but water, he stands again, leaning on the parapet, looking westward into the wind. The air has cleared beyond the bridge now; he can see ships there, waiting to come in; a tug is on its way out to meet one of them.

  And now almost at Andy’s feet, silently and with no disturbance at all, a head appears among the waves. One moment it was not there, and the next it is. It is a head so black and slick that Andy at first thinks it is the head of a man wearing a bathing cap. But it is the head of a sea lion who looks around with the intelligent gaze of a man, and then is gone so quickly and with so little disturbance that Andy, who was looking at it, cannot be sure when it went. So sudden, brief, and silent was its appearance, so intelligent its glossy eye, so perfect its absence, that when it rises again, Andy thinks, it may rise into a day two hundred years ago.

  A gray freighter comes into sight, going out. So far away as it is, it is silent, moving steadily along, already submitted to the long pulse of its engines that will drive it out under the bridge, past the headlands, into the wild ocean. Going where?

  Where might he not go? Who knows where he is? He feels the simplicity and lightness of his solitude. Other lives, other possible lives swarm around him.

  Distance comes upon him. Nobody in thousands of miles, nobody who knows him, knows where he is. If Flora wanted him now, how would she find him? How would a call or letter find him with news of any death or grief ? All distance is around him, and he wants nothing that he has. All choice is around him, and he knows nothing that he wants.

  I’ve come to another of thy limits, Lord. Is this the end?

  Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

  Though he did not think of her, the words come to him in his grandmother’s voice. They breathe themselves out of him in her voice and leave him empty, empty as if of his very soul. As though some corrosive light has flashed around him, he stands naked to time and distance, empty, and he has no thought.

  He hears the sound of hoofbeats approaching on a gravel road. It is dusk. He sees a little boy standing barefoot on the stones of a driveway leading up to the paintless walls of an old house, about which the air seems tense with the memory of loss and dying not long past, of weeping and gnashing of teeth. The swifts, oblivious, circle in long sweeps over the roof of the house and hover over its chimneys. The boy watches the swifts, thinking of the sounds of rifle fire and of cannon, of the running of many horses, and of the dead sons of the house, so much older than he, so long gone, that he will think of them always as his father’s sons, not as his brothers. He hears the nearer hoofbeats too, and he waits.

  They turn in at the gate; he turns to look now, and sees that it is a good high-headed bay horse. The man riding the horse is square-built and has a large beard. The boy likes the man’s eyes because they look straight at him and do not change and do not look away. The man stops beside the boy and crosses his hands over the pommel of the saddle.

  “My boy, might your sister be home?”

  “She ain’t ever anyplace else, hardly.”

  “I see.” The man thinks while he talks, and before, and after. “Well, can you show me where to put my horse?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Do you want to ride?”

  “Yessir.” He does want to ride, for he loves the horse, and perhaps the man too.

  The man reaches down with his hand. “Well, take a hold and give a jump.”

  The boy does as he is told, and is swung up behind the saddle.

  “I’m Ben Feltner. Who are you?”

  “Jack Beechum.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Ben Feltner clucks to the horse.

  “You came to see my sister?”

  “Your sister is Nancy Beechum?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, I came to see her.”

  That would have been 1868, and then and thus was the shuttle flung, for the first time in Andy’s knowledge, through the web of his making. Beyond that meeting, Mat, his grandfather, wakens, crying, in his cradle, and Bess, Andy’s mother, in hers, and Andy in his, and Andy’s own children in theirs: Betty, named Elizabeth for his mother, and Marcie, named Marcellus for his great-grandfather Catlett, born four years later than Jack Beechum into the same place and life.

  Though the light is still gray on the pier and over the water, a few windows are shining on the hill above Sausalito. Weak sunlight, while Andy watches, begins to color the slopes of
other hills north of the bridge, whitening the drifts of fog that lie in their hollows.

  A gull is walking on the parapet nearby, crying loudly, “Ahhh! Ahhh!” It comes so close that Andy can see its bright eye and the clear bead of seawater quivering on its beak.

  “What?” Andy says.

  The gull says, “Ahhh!”

  A sailboat passes, its sail unraised, its engine running slowly and quietly. The tug has met its ship and they are starting in.

  Again hoofbeats approach him over gravel, and he sees an old man coming on horseback through the same gate through the mist and slow rain of a morning in early March. Except for the strength of the light, the warming air, and a certain confidence in the surrounding birdsong, it still looks like the dead of winter. The pastures are brown, the trees bare. The house, though, is painted, and the whole place, which in 1868 looked almost forgotten, has obviously been remembered again and for a long time kept carefully in mind. It is seventy-six years later. The old man on the horse wears neatly a canvas hunting coat frayed at the cuffs and a felt hat creased in the crown by long wear and darkened by the rain. The horse is a rangy sorrel gelding, who, by the look of his eye, requires a master, which, by his gait and deportment, is what he has on his back. As he rides, the old man is looking around.

  He goes up beside the house and through the gate into the barn lot and into the barn.

  “Whoa,” he says. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” a voice says from the hayloft.

  There are footsteps on the loft floor and then a scrape, and a large forkful of hay drops onto the barn floor.

  The horse snorts and lunges backward. The old man sits him straight up and unsurprised. “Whoa,” he says, and with hand and heel forces the horse back up into the tracks he stood in before. With a little white showing in his eye, breathing loud, the horse stands in them, quivering. He does not offer to move again.