Remembering

by Wendell Berry

  A young man comes down the loft ladder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear your horse.”

  “It’s all right.”

  The old man waits, and the young man comes up by the horse’s left shoulder, laying a hand on his neck. “Whoa, boy.”

  “I’m Marce Catlett. I’m your neighbor. I’ve come to make your acquaintance.”

  The old man reaches down his hand and the young man reaches up and takes it.

  “I’m Elton Penn, Mr. Catlett.”

  Each knows the other by reputation, and each looks for the marks of what he has heard.

  The old man sees that the young man’s clothes are old, well mended, and well worn. He sees that he has a straight, clear look in his eye. He sees the good team of horses standing in their stalls, and their harness properly hung up.

  The young man sees the respect the sorrel horse has for his rider, and vice versa, the excellent fettle of the horse, the old saddle and bridle well attended, and he recognizes the exacting workman, the man of careful satisfactions whom he has heard about.

  “I think you know Wheeler Catlett,” Marce says. “He’s my boy. He thinks a lot of you.”

  “Yessir. I think a lot of him.”

  Elton stands with his hand on the horse’s neck. Marce sits looking over Elton’s and the horse’s heads into the barn.

  “Well, Jack Beechum was my neighbor all my life.”

  He looks back down at Elton and considers and says, “Jack Beechum is a good man. He’s been a good one. None better.”

  “That’s what I hear.” Elton says, “I haven’t met Mr. Beechum yet.”

  “Well, when you do, you’ll know him for what he is. You’ll see it in him.”

  Now, as by agreement, they turn and look out across the lot at the house, Elton no longer touching the horse.

  “I’ve got two grandboys. Wheeler’s. They’ll be over to bother you, I expect, now that the weather’s changing. You won’t offend me if you make ’em mind.”

  “Yessir.”

  Elton’s wife, Mary, comes out the kitchen door with a dishpan of water, crosses the yard, and flings the dirty water over the pasture fence. She comes back, stepping in a hurry, waves to the two of them, smiles, and goes back into the kitchen. Marce has watched her attentively, going out and coming back, and out of the corner of his eye Elton has watched him watching.

  “Son, you’ve got a good woman yonder. She’ll cook a man a meal of vittles before you know it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  They are again silent a moment, and then Marce says, “Well, you’ll do all right. Go ahead.”

  Without any signal from Marce that Elton sees or hears, the horse steps back into the swift, easy stride that brought him.

  “Come back, Mr. Catlett.”

  “I will that.”

  “Old man Marce Catlett will neighbor with you, if you treat him right,” Elton had been told before he moved. It proved true. Marce and Dorie Catlett and Elton and Mary Penn were neighbors, and in that neighborhood, Andy and Henry grew familiar and learned much.

  It did not last long as it was. It was the end of something old and long that Andy was born barely in time to know. Old Jack Beechum was already gone from his place. In two years Marce was dead, the horse and mule teams were going, the tractors and other large machines were coming, the old ways were ending.

  After Marce’s death, Andy came to stay with his grandmother, to help her and to be company for her. He was a restless boy, and to keep him occupied, she gave him all the eggs that her dominicker hens laid outside the henhouse. After school, he searched out the hidden nests in the barns and outbuildings, and put the eggs a few at a time into a basket in a closet. Through that early spring of Marce’s death, the grieved old woman and the eager boy talked of his project. He would save the eggs until he had enough, and then sell them, and with the money buy a setting of eggs of another kind from a neighbor. “Buff Orpingtons,” Dorie said. “They’re fine chickens. You can raise them to frying size and sell them, and then you’ll have some money to put in the bank.”

  “And next year we’ll raise some more.”

  “Maybe we will.”

  The evening comes when they put the eggs under a setting hen in the henhouse. He is holding the marked eggs in a basket, and Dorie is taking them out one by one and putting them under the hen.

  “You know, you can just order the chickens from a factory now, and they send them to you through the mail.”

  “But this is the best way, ain’t it?” He hopes it is, for he loves it.

  “It’s the cheapest. And the oldest. It’s been done this way a long time.”

  “How long, do you reckon?”

  “Oh, forever.”

  She puts the last egg under the hen, and strokes her back as she would have stroked a baby to sleep. Out the door he can see the red sky in the west. And he loves it there in the quiet with her, doing what has been done forever.

  “I hope we always do it forever,” he says.

  She looks down at him, and smiles, and then suddenly pulls his head against her. “Oh, my boy, how far away will you be sometime, remembering this?”

  The wind blows his tears back like the earpieces of a pair of spectacles. The bridge has begun to shine. He turns and sees that the sun has risen and is making a path toward him across the water.

  He is held, though he does not hold. He is caught up again in the old pattern of entrances: of minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds. The pattern limits and complicates him, singling him out in his own flesh. Out of the multitude of possible lives that have surrounded and beckoned to him like a crowd around a star, he returns now to himself, a mere meteorite, scorched, small, and fallen. He has met again his one life and one death, and he takes them back. It is as though, leaving, he has met himself already returning, pushing in front of him a barn seventy-five feet by forty, and a hundred acres of land, six generations of his own history, partly failed, and a few dead and living whose love has claimed him forever. He will be partial, and he will die; he will live out the truth of that. Though he does not hold, he is held. He is grieving, and he is full of joy. What is that Egypt but his Promised Land?

  Word of death and grief has reached him, and it is word of his own death and grief, which are his life too, his remembering and his joy.

  “Boys,” Mat says, “it was a hot day. There wasn’t a breeze anywhere in that bottom that would have moved a cobweb. It was punishing.” He is telling Elton and Andy.

  It was a long time ago. Mat was only a boy yet, though he was nearly grown. His Uncle Jack hired him to help chop out a field of tall corn in a creek bottom. It was hot and still, and the heat stood close around them as they worked. They felt they needed to tiptoe to get enough air.

  Mat thought he could not stand it any longer, and then he stood it a little longer, and they reached the end of the row.

  “Let’s go sink ourselves in the creek,” Jack said.

  They did. They hung their sweated clothes on willows in the sun to dry, and sank themselves in the cool stream up to their noses. It was a good hole, deep and shady, with the sound of the riffles above and below, and a kingfisher flying in and seeing them and flying away. All that afternoon when they got too hot, they went there.

  “Well sir,” Mat says, “it made that hard day good. I thought of all the times I’d worked in that field, hurrying to get through, to get to a better place, and it had been there all the time. I can’t say I’ve always lived by what I learned that day — I wish I had — but I’ve never forgot.”

  “What?” Andy says.

  “That it was there all the time.”

  “What?”

  “Redemption,” Mat says, and laughs. “A little flowing stream.”

  Beside Andy, the city stands on its hills, beyond the last dry pull across the rocks, the last dead mule and broken wheel. He can hear it, all its voices and engines washed together in the long murmur of its waking.

  Once, years ago, h
e and Flora and their friend Hal Jimson stood on Tamalpais, all the world below them covered with fog, and heard that murmur, low and far away, as of a country remembered. The sea of fog, white to the horizons, gleamed below them, and, in the draws of the mountain, swallows swung and dived in their hunting flights as though they moved in the paths of some unutterable song.

  And that was on the way. He is not going there.

  All the Marin peninsula is in sunlight. So far away, so bright, it might be the shining land, the land beyond, which many travelers have seen, but never reached.

  But the whole bay is shining now, the islands, the city on its hills, the wooden houses and the towers, the green treetops, the flashing waves and wings, the glory that moves all things resplendent everywhere.

  4. A Long Choosing

  Though he has not moved, he has turned. I must go now. If I am going to go, it is time. On the verge of his journey, he is thinking about choice and chance, about the disappearance of chance into choice, though the choice be as blind as chance. That he is who he is and no one else is the result of a long choosing, chosen and chosen again. He thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him, most of whom he never knew, some he knew, two he yet knows, who, choosing one another, chose him. He thinks of the choices, too, by which he chose himself as he now is. How many choices, how much chance, how much error, how much hope have made that place and people that, in turn, made him? He does not know. He knows that some who might have left chose to stay, and that some who did leave chose to return, and he is one of them. Those choices have formed in time and place the pattern of a membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it, which he did once, and now has done again.

  Nancy Beechum had her father to keep house for and then nurse and then bury, and her brother to raise. Ben Feltner was her faithful and patient suitor for eleven years. They married in 1879, when she was thirty-four and he thirty-nine. They had four children, of whom Mat, after the perils of birth, accident, and epidemic, was the one survivor. Mat was the first Feltner in his own line to leave Port William after the first ones had come there at the beginning of the century, and by then it was the beginning of the next.

  He did not go by his own choice. He went because he was sent; he was fifteen, and the time had come to send him, if he was ever to go. He had been the subject of discussion between his father and his mother, he knew. And so he was discomforted but not surprised when one day, instead of leaving the dinner table when he was finished, his father remained in his place and thought, and looked at Nancy, and looked at Mat.

  “Mat, my boy, we think highly of you, you know, and so we must part with you for a while.”

  They had arranged for him to attend a boarding school at Hargrave, run by a couple named Lowstudder. Mat did not want to go. He had never thought of going, and now that he had to think of it his reluctance took the shape of a girl, Margaret Finley, whom he had never not known, and whom, now that he thought of leaving her, he did not want to leave.

  But when the time came he did leave her. Ben drove him to the landing and put him on the boat with a small trunk, and shook his hand and gripped his shoulder and said nothing and left him. They raised the gangplank, the little steamboat backed into the channel, and Mat watched the green water widen between him and his life as he knew it.

  After three weeks Ben came to see him. Mat, summoned, found him sitting on the stile block where he had hitched his horse. He was smiling. He shook Mat’s hand, and Mat sat down beside him.

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Nosir.”

  Ben, his hand flat on his beard, sat looking out at the big trees in the yard in front of them.

  “Have you learned anything?”

  “Yessir. Some.”

  Again Ben looked away and considered.

  “Do you cry any of a night, son?”

  “Nosir.”

  “Are you lonesome for Margaret Finley?”

  “I miss you all too.”

  Ben stroked his hand slowly down his face and beard, thinking of something that made him smile.

  “You’re a good boy, Mat. I think you’d better stay.”

  He stayed four years. And then — because he did well enough, because Ben and Nancy thought well of him still — he went to the state college at Lexington. After two years, because he knew his own mind by then, and knew Margaret’s, he wrote at the end of one of his letters home: “Pa, when I come back this June, I am going to stay.” And Ben replied:

  My dear Mat,

  You have grown to a man and a good one I think. I ask no more. Come ahead. Stay on. There is employment here for you as much as you can make yourself equal to. We are plowing as weather permits. We have two excellent mule foals from the gray mares. Your Ma is well and sends her love, as I do also. Pa

  It is early June of 1906, a sunny day. The little steamboat, The Blue Wing, has stopped, it seems to him, a hundred times, to unload a barrel of flour and a bolt of cloth at one landing, and at another, a mile downstream, to load a drove of hogs and two passengers, as unmindful of his haste as time itself.

  At last he sees forming ahead of them, still blue with distance, the shape of the Port William hill, and then one of his father’s open ridge-tops, and then the steeple pointing up over the trees, and then the old elm at the landing. As the boat sidles in out of the current, he looks up and sees standing on the porch of the store above the road Margaret, who has loved him all his life until then, and will love him all the rest of it. She has heard the whistle and walked down to meet him. He waves. She smiles and waves back, and an old longing, the size of himself, opens within him.

  He is moving toward the gangplank, the end of which is already poised over the bank. The boat is coming in only to put him off; it will not stop long enough to tie up. He is ready to step onto the plank when an old man who has been watching him hooks him with his cane.

  “You’re Ben Feltner’s boy.”

  “Yessir.”

  The old man shakes his white beard in self-congratulation. “I sometimes miss the dam. I never miss the sire.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And your mammy was a Beechum.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, you got some good stock in you,” the old man says, feeling his shoulder and looking him over. Oh, taking his time!

  “You been up there to that college, my boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, you’ll be going away now, I reckon, to make something out of yourself.”

  Mat is stepping onto the plank, free now. “Nosir, I reckon not.”

  Margaret is coming down the bank to meet him, her long skirt gathered in one hand to keep it out of the dew.

  “Now, here are your extra clothes. They’re clean, and I’ve darned your socks. That sack’s got your shaving things in it and some other odds and ends. And there’s a check in there from your granddaddy for your wages, and I think maybe a little more.”

  Margaret has a list in her mind. Andy is going away to college, and she has been thinking, for days maybe, of what she must do and what she must say.

  “Okay,” he says. He would like to leave, for he knows that all these things signify her love for him, and he is going away, and she is sad, and he is.

  “Now wait. I’m not finished. Inside that sack is a tin of cookies for you to take with you to school. Don’t shake them and make crumbs out of them, and don’t eat them before you get there. And when you do get there I want you to apply yourself and study hard, because I think you’ve got a good mind and it would be a shame to waste it. Your granddaddy thinks so too.”

  She pauses, thinking over the rest that she must say. Her eyes are on him, direct and grave behind her glasses. He cannot turn away or look away until she is ready for him to go. He is grinning but not, he knows, fooling her.

  “Listen. There are some of us here who love you mighty well and respect you and think you’re fine. There may be times when you’ll need to think of that.”
>
  He has two thousand miles to go, and if he is going he must begin. He thinks of how far he has come, how many miles, how many steps. Some who came here came by steps, across prairie and desert and mountain, past the whitened bones of starved oxen and horses and mules, the discarded furniture and wrecked wagons, the stone-mounded graves of those who had come earlier and come no farther. He thinks of flying. At what risk and cost do the fallen fly?

  Preserve me, O Lord, until I return. Preserve those I am returning to until I return.

  When he does remove his elbows from the parapet where he has been leaning, and turns, and steps away, a history turns around in his mind, as if some old westward migrant, who had reached the edge at last and seen the blue uninterruptible water reaching out around the far side of the world, had turned in his tracks and started eastward again.

  He walks along the pier, past the backs of the intent fishermen and the concrete benches and back onto land again. There are swimmers in the harbor, early sightseers standing and walking about, and on the walks of Aquatic Park joggers trotting in pairs and talking. He makes his way among them, in the hold of a direction now, stepping, alone and among strangers, in the first steps of a long journey that, by nightfall, will bring him back where he cannot step but where he has stepped before, where people of his lineage and history have stepped for a hundred and seventy-five years or more in an indecipherable pattern of entrances, minds into minds, minds into place, places into minds: the worn and wasted, sorrow-salted ground, familiar to him as if both known and dreamed, that owns him in a membership that he did not make, but has chosen, and that is death and life and hope to him. He is hurrying.

  “Hey, man!”

  Andy stops, astonished, for it is clear to him that he is being addressed, though he does not yet see by whom. And then he sees the fringed and shaggy man hurrying toward him out of a side street, the rolled bandanna around his head, his hand in the air.