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That
Distant Land: The Collected Stories by Wendell Berry Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Community The 23 short stories in Wendell Berry’s new
collection, That
Distant Land, are presented chronologically, in the history of the
fictional town, Port William. The spring work had started, and I
needed a long night’s rest, or that was my opinion, and I was about to go to
bed, but then the telephone rang. It was Elton. He had been getting ready for
bed, too, I think, and it had occurred to him then that he was
worried. “Andy when did
you see the Rowanberrys?” I knew what he
had on his mind. The river was in flood. The backwater was over the bottoms,
and Art and Mart would not be able to get out except by boat or on foot. “Not since the
river came up.” “Well, neither
have I. And their phone’s out. Mary when did Mart call up here?” I heard Mary
telling him, “Monday night,” and then, “It was Monday night,” Elton said to
me. “I’ve tried to call every day since, and I can’t get anybody That’s four
days.” “Well, surely
they’re all right.” “Well, that’s
what Mary and I have been saying. Surely they are. They’ve been taking care
of themselves a long time. But, then, you never know” “The thing is,
we don’t know” We knew what
we were doing, and both of us were a little embarrassed about it. The Elton said, “It’s not hard, you know,
to think of things that could happen.” “Well,” I said, “do you think we’d
better go see about them?” He laughed. “Well, we’ve thought,
haven’t we? I guess we’d better go.” “All right. I’ll meet you at the
mailbox.” I hung up and went to get my cap and
jacket. “Nobody’s heard from Art and Mart for
four days,” I said to Flora. “Their phone’s out.” ‘And you and Elton are going to see
about them,” Flora said. She had been eavesdropping. “I guess we are.” Flora was inclined to be amused at the
way Elton and I imagined the worst. She did not imagine the worst. She just
dealt with mortality as it happened. I picked up a flashlight as I went out
the door, but it was not much needed. The moon was big, bright enough to put
out most of the stars. I walked out to the mailbox and made myself
comfortable, leaning against it. Elton and I had obliged ourselves
to worry about the Rowanberrys, but I was glad all
the same for the excuse to be out. The night was still, the country all
silvery with moonlight, inlaid with bottomless shadows, and the air shimmered
with the trilling of peepers from every stream and pond margin for miles, one
full-throated sound filling the ears so that it seemed impossible that you
could hear anything else. And yet I heard Elton’s pickup while it
was still a long way off, and then light glowed in the air, and then I could
see his headlights. He turned into the lane and stopped and pushed the door
open for me. I made room for myself among a bundle of empty feed sacks, two
buckets, and a chain saw. “Fine night,” he said. He had lit a
cigarette, and the cab was fragrant with smoke. “It couldn’t be better, could it?” “Well, the moon could be just a little
brighter, and it could be a teensy bit warmer.” I could hear that he was grinning. He
was in one of his companionable moods, making fun of himself. I laughed, and we rode without talking
down the Katy’s Branch road and turned onto the blacktop. “It’s awful the things that can get
into your mind,” Elton said. “I’d hate it if anything was to happen to them.” Elton had known the Rowanberrys
ever since he was just a little half-orphan boy, living with his mother and
older brothers. He had got a lot of his raising by being underfoot and in the
way at the Rowanberrys’. And in the time of his
manhood, the Elton worked hard and worried hard, and
he was often in need of rest. But he had a restless mind, which meant that he
could not rest on his own place in the presence of his own work. If he rested
there, first he would begin to think about what he had to do, and then he
would begin to do it. To rest, he needed to be in somebody
else’s place. We spent a lot of Sunday afternoons down at the Rowanberrys’, on the porch looking out into the little
valley in the summertime, inside by the stove if it was winter. Art and Mart
batched there together after their mother died, and in spite of the electric
lights and telephone and a few machines, they lived a life that would have
been recognizable to Elias Rowanberry, who had marked his X in the county’s
first deed book—a life that involved hunting and fishing and foraging as
conventionally as it involved farming. They practiced an old-fashioned
independence, an old-fashioned generosity, and an old-fashioned fidelity to
their word and their friends. And they were hound men of the old correct
school. They would not let a dog tree anywhere in earshot, day or night,
workday or Sunday, without going to him. “It can be a nuisance,” Art said,
“but it don’t hardly seem right to disappoint ‘em.” Mart was the one Elton liked best to
work with. Mart was not only a fine hand but had a gift for accommodating
himself to the rhythms and ways of his partner. “He can think your thoughts,”
Elton said. Between the two of them was a sympathy
of body and mind that they had worked out and that they trusted with an
unshaken, unspoken trust. And so Elton was always at ease and quiet in Mart’s
company when they were at rest. Art was the rememberer.
He knew what he knew and what had been known by a lot of dead kinfoiks and neighbors. They lived on in his mind and
spoke there, reminding him and us of things that needed to be remembered. Art
had a compound mind, as a daisy has a compound flower, and his mind had
something of the unwary comeliness of a daisy Something that happened would
remind him of something that he remembered, which would remind him of
something that his grandfather remembered. It was not that he “lived in his
mind.” He lived in the place, but the place was where the memories were, and
he walked among them, tracing them out over the living ground. That was why
we loved him. We followed the state road along the
ridges toward Port William and then at the edge of town turned down the Elton stopped the truck. He turned off
his headlights and the engine, and the quietness of the moonlight and the
woods came down around us. I could hear the peepers again. It was wonderful
what the road going under the water did to that place. It was not only that
we could not go where we were used to going; it was as if a thought that we
were used to thinking could not be thought. “Listen!” Elton said. He had heard a
barred owl off in the woods. He quietly rolled the window down. And then, right overhead, an owl
answered: “H00000AWWW!” And the far one said, “Hoo hoo hoohooaw!” “Listen!” Elton said again. He was
whispering. The owls went through their whole
repertory of hoots and clucks and cackles and gobbles. “Listen to them!” Elton said. “They’ve
got a lot on their minds.” Being in the woods at night excited him. He was a
hunter. And we were excited by the flood’s interruption of the road. The
rising of the wild water had moved us back in time. Elton quietly opened his door and got
out and then, instead of slamming the door, just
pushed it to. I did the same and came around and followed him as he walked
slowly down the road, looking for a place to climb out of the cut. Once we had climbed the bank and
stepped over the fence and were walking among the big trees, we seemed
already miles from the truck. The water gleamed over the bottomlands below us
on our right; you could not see that there had ever been a road in that
place. I followed Elton along the slope through the trees. Neither of us
thought to use a flashlight, though we each had one,
nor did we talk. The moon gave plenty of light. We could see everything—
underfoot the blooms of twin-leaf, bloodroot, rue
anemone, the little stars of spring beauties, and overhead the littlest
branches, even the blooms on the sugar maples. The ground was soft from the
rain, and we hardly made a sound. The flowers around us seemed to float in
the shadows so that we walked like waders among stars, uncertain how far down
to put our feet. And over the broad shine of the backwater, the calling of
the peepers rose like another flood, higher than the water flood, and
thrilled and trembled in the air. It was a long walk because we had to go
around the inlets of the backwater that lay in every swag and hollow. Way
off, now and again, we could hear the owls. Once we startled a deer and stood
still while it plunged away into the shadows. And always we were walking
among flowers. I wanted to keep thinking that they were like stars, but after
a while I could not think so. They were not like stars. They did not have
that hard, distant glitter. And yet in their pale, peaceful way, they shone.
They collected their little share of light and gave it hack. Now and then,
when we came to an especially thick patch of them, Elton would point. Or he
would raise his hand and we would stop a minure and
listen to the owls. I was wider awake than I had been since
morning. I would have been glad to go on walking all night long. Around us we
could feel the year coming, as strong and wide and irresistible as a wind. But we were thinking, too, of the Rowanberrys. That we were in a mood to loiter and did not
loiter would have reminded us of them, if we had needed reminding. To go to
their house, with the water up, would have required a long walk from any
place we could have started. We were taking the shortest way, which left us
with the problem that it was going to be a little too short. The best we could do, this way, would be to come down the valley until
we would be across from the house but still divided from it by a quarter mile
or more of backwater. We could call to them from there. But what if we got no
answer? What if the answer was trouble? Well, they had a boat over there. If
they needed us, one of them could set us over in the boat. But what if we got
no answer? What if, to put the best construction upon silence, they could not
hear us? Well, we could only go as near as we could get and call. So if our walk had the feeling of a
ramble, it was not one. We were going as straight to the Rowanberrys’
house as the water and the lay of the land would allow After a while we began
to expect to see a light. And then we began to wonder if there was a light to
see. Elton stopped. “I thought we’d have
seen their light by now” I said, “They’re probably asleep.” Those were the first words we had
spoken since we left the truck. After so long, in so much quiet, our voices
sounded small. Elton went on among the trees and the
shadows, and I followed him. We climbed over a little shoulder of the slope
then and saw one window shining. It was the light of an oil lamp, so their
electricity was out, too. ‘And now we’re found,” Elton said. He
sang it, just that much of the old hymn, almost in a whisper. We went through a little more of the
woods and climbed the fence into the Rowanberrys’
hill pasture. We could see their big barn standing up black now against the
moonlight on the other side of the road, which was on high ground at that
place, clear of the backwater. When we were on the gravel we could
hear our steps. We walked side by side, Elton in one wheel track, I in the
other, until the road went under the water again. We were as close to the
house then as we could get without a boat. We stopped and considered the
distance. It was only a quarter of a mile, but at night, with the water
dividing us, it seemed almost hopelessly far. And then Elton cupped his hands around
his mouth, and called, “Ohhhhh, Mart! Ohhhhh, Art!” We waited, it seemed, while Art had
time to say, “Did you hear somebody?” and Mart to answer, “Well, I thought
so.” We saw light come to another window, as somebody picked up a lamp
and opened the hail door. We heard the front door open. And then Art’s voice
came across the water: “Yeeeaaah?” And Elton called back, ‘Are you aaalll riiight?” I knew they were. They were all right,
and we were free to go back through the woods and home to sleep. But now I know that it was neither of
the Rowanberrys who was under the sign of mortality
that night. It was Elton. Before another April came he would be in his grave
on the hill at Port William. Old Art Rowanberry, who had held him on his lap,
would survive him a dozen years. And now that both of them are dead, I
love to think of them standing with the shining backwater between them, while
Elton’s voice goes out across the distance, is heard and answered, and the
other voice travels back: “Yeeeaaah!” I
had read about half of these stories over the years, and found that I enjoyed
every one on reading or re-reading. Savor spending the next month reading one
of the stories from That
Distant Land every night or so. Through that, you’ll come away with a
richer understanding of human nature, an appreciation of the importance of
community in our lives, and a renewed commitment to the values that direct
your life. Steve
Hopkins, August 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2004 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/That
Distant Land.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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