Free Remembering by Wendell Berry Page B

her long skirt gathered in one hand to keep it out of the dew.

    â€œNow, 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.
    â€œOkay,” 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.
    â€œNow 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.
    â€œListen. 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.
    â€œHey, 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.
    â€œSay, good brother, could you, like, spare me a buck for a light lunch?”
    â€œHold on, now,” Andy says. “Isn’t this the same day it was this morning when I gave you six dollars?”

    â€œAh!” the man says. “Indeed!” He steps back a pace and makes the low bow of a cavalier, sweeping the pavement with the edge of his hand. “Pass, friend.”
    â€œThanks, friend,” Andy says. He hurries on.
    The city