Free Remembering by Wendell Berry Page A

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.
    â€œDo you like it here?”
    â€œNosir.”
    Ben, his hand flat on his beard, sat looking out at the big trees in the yard in front of them.
    â€œHave you learned anything?”
    â€œYessir. Some.”
    Again Ben looked away and considered.
    â€œDo you cry any of a night, son?”
    â€œNosir.”
    â€œAre you lonesome for Margaret Finley?”
    â€œI miss you all too.”
    Ben stroked his hand slowly down his face and beard, thinking of something that made him smile.
    â€œYou’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:
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    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
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    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.
    â€œYou’re Ben Feltner’s boy.”
    â€œYessir.”
    The old man shakes his white beard in self-congratulation. “I sometimes miss the dam. I never miss the sire.”
    â€œYessir.”

    â€œAnd your mammy was a Beechum.”
    â€œYessir.”
    â€œWell, you got some good stock in you,” the old man says, feeling his shoulder and looking him over. Oh, taking his time!
    â€œYou been up there to that college, my boy?”
    â€œYessir.”
    â€œWell, 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,