Free A Place in Time by Wendell Berry Page B

apples got all swiveled up before they could be eaten. There was a famous day when she had come to town for a gallon of coal oil, and the lecrik went off and every light bug in Jones’s Merchandise went out all to-wunst. She had seen two cars meetin a headlong collusion. She loved, moreover, to refine her pronunciation by adding r’s to words such as “crush” and “crunch” and “push” so that they came out “crursh” and “crurnch” and “pursh.” Virtually everybody in Sycamore had learned Zinnian and spoke it on every appropriate occasion.
    Of these and others, as church members or as not-members, the Milbys were given knowledge.
    You could usefully think of the consciousness of Sycamore as the continual, continually wandering story that in one way or another included everybody, carrying them through time like the current of the river.
    Or, usefully also, you could think of it as graduated depths in that flow. At the top was the convivial talk, open and unembarrassed. Below that, quieter and darker and less free, was the talk that issued from fear and envy, cherished grudges and resentments, meannesses, suspicions, unforgiven or unregretted wrongs. This was not so readily heard by newcomers, but the Milbys stayed long enough (they stayed until after the end of World War II) to hear most of it, if not all. It proved itself continually to be present, to be regrettable, and sometimes to be worried about.
    Below that, much quieter and darker, and yet to the conscience of the young minister most present of all, was the depth at which the community suffered its mortality, error, pain, and grief. How many among the older wives or widows had buried a child struck down by a winter illness or an epidemic or a bullet in France, who now remembered in silence?
    As the knowledge of this depth of suffering grew upon her, Laura understood, as she had not before, the gravity of her husband’s calling, for she saw that it was to this suffering that he was called. As he sank inevitably into it or as it rose inevitably out of its depth, its quietness and darkness, to meet him, she saw not only the gravity of his calling but its authenticity. For Williams Milby had the gift of comforting. He carried with him, not by his will, it seemed, but by the purest gift, the very presence of comfort. And yet even as it was a comfort to others, it could be a bafflement and a burden to him. His calling, and the respect accorded to it, admitted him into the presence of troubles he could not mend. When old Uncle Jones McKinney, who had been sick for a long time, finally died, and afterwards his old wife, Aunt Ruth, would hear him calling her in the night and would get up and go to his bed and again find it empty, what could any livingmortal do for her that would be of any use at all? A living mortal could do only as Williams Milby did: go and sit with her while she mourned, and then leave her in her mourning, for no living mortal could sit with another time without end. It was plain to him—and Laura knew this—that he was always hopelessly in debt to his own ministry, for he could not give all that he wanted and longed to give. He was needed, even so, and what he had to give, and more, was continually asked of him. People were glad to see him coming. They called him to come. They were glad to have him around when they did not need him, just for the assurance that he would be at hand when they did need him.
    And as Laura had earlier given him her trust that until then she did not know was hers, now she granted him a sort of honor that was not personal, not hers or his, but honor to his vocation that he had not surely known was his until he began to fulfill it.
    At Sycamore, then, Laura grew with her husband into a life that probably neither of them had expected. She grew also into knowledge of the church’s function of iteration. The church house itself, she now saw, was a place