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

hardships, not complaining,
never believing that they might have been doing something better.
    Dick and Aunt Sarah Jane's two-room house at the edge of the woods,
down the hill from the barns, was a part of the Home Place, but it was
also a place unto itself, with its own garden and henhouse and woodpile.
Aunt Sarah Jane did not work "out." She kept house and gardened and
cared for a small flock of chickens and foraged in the fields and woods and
sewed and mended and read her Bible. In the mornings and the evenings
and in odd times spared from the farmwork, Dick kept their house supplied with water and milk, meat and firewood. I remember their pleasure
in all the items of their small abundance: buckets of milk from Dick's cow,
cured joints and middlings from their hogs, vegetables from Aunt Sarah
Jane's garden, the herbs and greens and mushrooms she gathered on her
walks.
    In those years when I could not be with Uncle Andrew, I loved almost
as much to be with Dick, though the two of them could hardly have been less alike. Dick was as gentle and quiet as Uncle Andrew was brash and
uproarious. And whereas Uncle Andrew's great aim in life was to "get out
among'em," Dick, when I knew him, anyhow, was mostly content to stay
put. With Uncle Andrew, you were always on a trajectory that was going
to take you back to the road and on to someplace else. With Dick, when
he wasn't behind a team or on horseback, you traveled on foot, going not
away but deeper in. Dick could sit still. He could sit on his rock doorstep
after supper, smoke his pipe, and talk slowly and thoughtfully until bedtime. In my memories of Uncle Andrew, I am often behind him or off to
the side, watching him, feeding my curiosity as to what manner of man
he was. In my memories of Dick Watson, I am often beside him, holding
his hand. From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just
by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see -
such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.

    Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather's mare and I on Beauty
the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and
learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes
abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an
occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard
fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted
the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along
the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running
gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by
hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.
    But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick's own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of
work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot,
woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well
and water trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it.
He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and
did not complain. Years later, when I was looking for the way home, his
was one of the minds that guided me.
    After he and then Grandpa were dead, the farm, in spite of my father's
long caring for it, lacked a coherence that it had had before. It needed not
just attention and work but lives that made it a world and lived from it.

    For several years after those deaths, I stayed with Grandma for months at
a time. She started coming to Hargrave to spend the winters in a room at
the Broadfield Hotel. And then on a Saturday morning in March or April,
with spring bright in the air, Elton Penn would come with his truck, and
we would load Grandma's spool bed, her comfortable rocker, her clothes
and linens, and take her home.
    I would move in then to stay with her