Free A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) by Wendell Berry Page A

compassionate enough, but also for want of enough compassion -I
denied that I was who I was, and so made myself less than I was. This
was my first conscious experience of a shame that was irremediable and
hopeless - a shame, as I now suppose, that Uncle Andrew may have met
in himself, in her presence, many a time.
    This surely was the punishment that she dealt out, wittingly or not,
willingly or not, to him and to the rest of us. And if at times in the past
I could abandon her to the self-martyrdom of the self absorbed, and
though I see now better than then how impossible she was, still I am
sorry. For I can no longer forget that loss and illness and trouble, however
a person may exploit them, cannot be exploited without being suffered.
Aunt Judith exploited them and suffered them, and suffered her exploitation of them. She suffered and she was alone.
    And so she is inescapable. In my mind I will always see her standing
there in the street, her head tilted stiffly up, hopelessly hoping for some
earthly pity greater than her pity for herself.

     

9
    The house that Uncle Andrew seemed most to be gone from was not,
for me, the one where he had lived in rented rooms with Aunt Judith and
Momma-pie. Nor was it my own house at Hargrave, orJake and Minnie's
at the Crayton Place. Where I most often met his absence and was obliged
to deal with it was at Grandma and Grandpa Catlett's.
    Grandpa had been born in an earlier house on that site, the last of five
children, about a year before the end of the Civil War. That house burned
when he was six, and the present house was built on the old foundation.
In the second winter after Uncle Andrew's death, Grandpa took sick,
went to bed, and did not get up again.
    All his life he had gone to the barn at bedtime to see to his animals and
make sure that all was well. That winter, staying at night with Grandpa,
my father went to the barn at bedtime and returned to say that all was
well. 'And then," my father said, "he would be pleased."
    "The day after I die," Grandpa told my father, "get up and go to work."
He died where he was born, in the same corner of the same room, though
in a different house. And on a raw day in the late winter we carried him,
dressed up, to Port William and left him there in the hill under the falling
rain.
    The year and a half and a little more between the day of Uncle
Andrew's death and the day of Grandpa's funeral seems to me now to
have been a time of ending, not just of lives but of a kind of life and a kind of world. I did not recognize that ending as consciously then as I do
now, but I felt its shadow. Uncle Andrew had not belonged to the older life;
though he had grown up in it, he had lived away from it. He belonged to
the self-consciously larger life that came into being with the First World
War, and that was now rapidly establishing itself by means of another
war, industrial machinery, and electric wires. But though that new world
was undeniably present on the roads, the life of our fields still depended
on the bodily strength and skill of people and horses and mules. In
the minds of my grandfather and Dick Watson, the Brightleafs, and the
Branches, the fundamental realities and interests and pleasures were
the same as they had been in the minds of the people who had worked
in the same fields before the Civil War.

    The first death after Uncle Andrew's had been Dick Watson's, and Dick,
like my grandfather, belonged to that older world. That the two of them
belonged also to two different and in some ways opposite races did not
keep them from belonging in common to a kind of humanity. They were
farming people. What distinguished them from ever-enlarging numbers
of people in succeeding generations was that they had never thought of
being anything else. This gave them a kind of integrity and a kind of
concentration. They did their work with undivided minds, intent upon
its demands and pleasures, reconciled to its