Remembering
Page 12
After a while he returns to the kitchen. He takes his suitcase to his and Flora’s bedroom and unpacks it and puts it away, and walks again. He can no more sit down than if he has no knees. He does not know when Flora and the children will be back, and he sees that he cannot wait for them in the house. He puts on his work clothes and starts out the back door. And then — the thought of mortality returning to him; he must take no chance — he goes back to the kitchen table and beneath Flora’s note writes:Yes.
I’m better now. Can you
forgive me? I pray that you
will forgive me.
The cows are still at the spring, still in the leisure of their drinking. They look at him and look away, knowing him. To them he is no one who has been far away, but only himself, whom they know, who is here. He takes a tin can from the ledge above the spring outlet and dips and drinks. And then he walks out into the pasture on the hillside.
The air is cooling now, the shadows growing long. He is walking upward along the face of the slope, following the slanting sodded groove of what was once a wagon road — before that perhaps a buffalo trace — that went from Katy’s Branch to Port William. Where the road enters the woods, he opens a gate and goes through.
When he fenced the woods to keep the stock out, Elton asked him, “Why did you do that?”
“For the flowers,” Andy said, giving one of his reasons.
Elton looked at him to see if he meant it. “Well. All right,” he said.
The almost-disappearing road slants on up along Harford Run, through the woods, through the Harford Place and the others beyond, for perhaps a mile, until finally it comes out of the woods again on a high part of the upland near Port William.
The evening is quiet; there is no wind, and no sound from the stream that here, above the spring, is dry. The woods is filling with shadows. Everything seems expectant, waiting for nightfall, though the sky is still sunlit. Andy walks slowly upward along the road until he is among the larger trees and the woods has completely enclosed him. And here finally he comes to rest. He finds a level place at the foot of a large oak, and sits down, and then presently lies down. A heavy weariness has come over him. For a long time he has not slept a restful sleep, and he has journeyed a long way.
But the sleep that comes to him now is not restful. He has entered the dark, and it is such a darkness as he has never known. All that is around him and all that he is has disappeared into it. He sees nothing, remembers nothing, knows nothing except a hopeless longing for something he does not know, for which he does not know a name. Everything has been taken away, and the dark around him is full of the sounds of crying and of tearing asunder. If it is a sleep that he is in, he cannot awaken himself. Once he was nothing, and did not know it; and then, for a little while, it seems, he was something, to the sole effect that now he knows that he is nothing. And somewhere there is a lovely something, infinitely desirable, of which he cannot recall even the name. What he is, all that he is, amid the outcries in the dark and the rendings, is a nothing possessed of a terrible self-knowledge.
But now from outside his hopeless dark sleep a touch is laid upon his shoulder, a pressure like that of a hand grasping, and his form shivers and forks out into the darkness, and is shaped again in sense. Breath and light come into him. He feels his flesh enter into mind, mind into flesh. He turns, puts his knee under him, stands, and, though dark to himself, is whole.
He is where he was, in the valley, on the hillside under an oak, but the place is changed. It is almost morning and a gray light has made its way among the trees. The freshness of dew is on everything. And it is springtime, for the dry stream has begun to flow. The early flowers are in bloom, pale, at his feet. Everywhere, near and far away, there is birdsong. The birds sing a joy that is theirs and his, and neither theirs nor his.
When he has stood and looked around, he sees that a man, dark as shadow, is walking away from him up the hill road, not far ahead. Andy knows that, once, this man leaned and looked at him face-to-face and touched him, but now, walking ahead of him, is not going to look back.
He hurries to follow the dark man, who is almost out of sight and who he understands must be his guide, for the place, though it is familiar to him, is changed. Though he can see ahead to where his guide walks, the ground underfoot is dark, seeming not to exist until his foot touches it. He follows the dark man along the narrow ancient track in the almost dark, as when he was a boy he followed older hunters in the woods at night, Burley Coulter and Elton Penn and the Rowanberrys, men who knew the way, who were the way of the places they led him through.
The trees on the hillside are large and old, as if centuries have passed since Andy was last here. It is growing rapidly lighter. Daylight is in the sky now, and against it, still in shadow, Andy can see the small new foliage of the great trees, the white and yellow and blue of the flowers, and birdsong fills the sky over the woods with a joy that welcomes the light and is like light.
And now above and beyond the birds’ song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light’s music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light.
He would stop, he would stop to stand and listen, or to stay forever, for he knows now that he has entered the eternal place in which we live in time, but the dark man, the dark man giving light, does not stop. He steps on up the hill road, and he does not look back.
Though the climb is longer than Andy remembers, even in its strangeness it is familiar. They go up beneath the great-girthed outspreading trees beside the stream of water coming down, the light glancing and singing off the little falls. As they climb, the music grows steadily stronger and brighter around them. The sun has come over the hill and is shining into the valley now. The shiver that stretched out in Andy’s body when the dark man touched him has stayed in it. He is full of joy and he is afraid. He expects to die, and yet he lives, stepping on and on over the dry leaves and the little trembling flowers.
Finally the road brings them up, out from under the trees, onto the high part of the upland. And here the dark man does stop, and Andy stops, nearer to him than he has been before, but still several steps behind.
The dark man points ahead of them; Andy looks and sees the town and the fields around it, Port William and its countryside as he never saw or dreamed them, the signs everywhere upon them of the care of a longer love than any who have lived there have ever imagined. The houses are clean and white, and great trees stand among them and spread over them. The fields lie around the town, divided by rows of such trees as stand in the town and in the woods, each field more beautiful than all the rest. Over town and fields the one great song sings, and is answered everywhere; every leaf and flower and grass blade sings. And in the fields and the town, walking, standing, or sitting under the trees, resting and talking together in the peace of a sabbath profound and bright, are people of such beauty that he weeps to see them. He sees that these are the membership of one another and of the place and of the song or light in which they live and move.
He sees that they are the dead, and they are alive. He sees that he lives in eternity as he lives in time, and nothing is lost. Among the people of that town, he sees men and women he remembers, and men and women remembered in memories he remembers, and they do not look as he ever saw or imagined them. The young are no longer
young, nor the old old. They appear as children corrected and clarified; they have the luminous vividness of new grass after fire. And yet they are mature as ripe fruit. And yet they are flowers.
He would go to them, but another movement of his guide’s hand shows him that he must not. He must go no closer. He is not to stay. Grieved as he may be to leave them, he must leave. He wants to leave. He must go back with his help, such as it is, and offer it.
He has come into the presence of these living ones by a change of sight, by which he has parted from them as they were and from himself as he was and is.
Now he prepares to leave them. Their names singing in his mind, he lifts toward them the restored right hand of his joy.
Copyright © 2008 by Wendell Berry.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This book is a work of fiction. Nothing is in it that has not been imagined.
I am grateful to Bucknell University for inviting me to be Poet-in-Residence in the winter of 1987. Much of the work on this book was done during that time.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berry, Wendell, 1934-
Remembering : a novel / Wendell Berry
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43957-0
1. Port William (Ky. : Imaginary place) — Fiction.
2. City and town life — Fiction. 3. Kentucky — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E75R46 2008
813’.54 — dc22 2007044431
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