My father's mother is the last of twelve children born to a man named Joshua Liddle between 1897 and 1921. It was my first and greatest blessing to have spent a large portion of my childhood with my grandmother, and in that time I came to know all of those brothers and sisters -- even the oldest one -- save for the three who were gone from this world before I came into it. I spent time in their kitchens, I heard their voices, I felt their hands upon my shoulder. Through my grandmother and through those men and women I came to know a world that is becoming lost to memory. It is a world where people gathered what they needed from their land. It is a world defined by the turn of seasons and by work. It is a world that was utterly changed by World War Two, an event of such importance that for those who lived it, it is simply The War. "Where was he in the war?" "Oh, that was before the war." As I write, my grandmother is the last living link to this world among my family. I feel one of her gifts to me was to let me live in it through her memory and through the stories told by all those brothers and sisters. It made me an old soul, but it also made me who I am. When I first read Wendell Berry, I was struck by how it drew me back to these people of mine. He seemed to have written what I felt in my heart, and walking around in his world of Port William was, for me, exactly like walking around the world of my kin.
Andy Catlett is a character who has been given this same gift.
"Yet, as he crosses the road, Andy is aware as always that he approaches a past much older than his own, that he cannot remember. But it is a past that, listening to Old Jack's and his grandparents' talk, he can enter with his imagination, and in that way he has taken possession of it. Since boyhood he has been Old Jack's listener, the student of his memory. And there has come to be a part of his mind that is spacious and old, hung with the elaborately interconnecting web of Port William lineages, containing landscapes changed beyond recognition years before his birth, peopled by men and women and children whose names have turned mossy on their graves."
I have come to know and to love a lot of people who live in Port William. I cannot choose a favorite character, but there are those who I relish reading about -- Burley Coulter, Mat Feltner, Nathan Coulter, Jayber Crow, and, of course, Uncle Jack Beechum. Jack is a man defined by his work and by his understanding that he is only passing through a story that started at the beginning of time and that will go on without him when he is gone. The land, his place, his farm does not belong to him. Rather, he belongs to it and not in a way that is permanent. When he becomes too old to stay alone on the place and to tend to it as it should be tended to, in spite of his grieving at what is passing away from him, he knows that in a man named Elton Penn, who eventually will own the farm, he has done right by the place. He has found someone who also understands his responsibility and for what it is that he must toil. There are many things I love about Old Jack Beechum. He does not waste words or time. He is constantly moving and he has little respect for someone who is not up and about and working by the time the sun has cast its light upon the earth anew.
"Wheeler does not estimate, at least not about what has been earned, and so the form of their business dealings has come to be this terrible argument, which they both enjoy a great deal. 'God Almighty, no!' Wheeler will say. 'Where in hell did you ever get such a figure as that?' And Old Jack will say, 'Out of my head, by God, that knew this business before you was born, and had a hat on it three hours before you was out of bed.'"No matter how many times I read The Memory of Old Jack, it is still just as powerful a moment each time I read the last paragraph. I am there with the other men late in the day in December as they work together stripping tobacco, and Wheeler Catlett has come to join them. Elton Penn remarks that Old Jack would appreciate the good harvest, the brightness and size of the tobacco leaves, and they begin together a rememberance of "the old boss."
"'Where are you, son? Damn it to hell. It's daylight!' In all their minds his voice lies beneath a silence. And in the hush of it they are aware of something that passed from them and now returns: his stubborn biding with them to the end, his keeping of faith with them who would live after him, and what perhaps none of them has yet thought to call his gentleness, his long gentleness toward them and toward this place where they are at work. They know that his memory holds them in common knowledge and common loss. The like of him will not soon live again in this world, and they will not forget him."My copies of Wendell Berry's novels are well-marked by pencil strokes underlining passage after passage like the ones above. I have often thought that I should simply take the time to underline entire books. Because, each time I reread one of them, I am struck again by the turn of a particular phrase, a certain metaphor, and just the lyrical prose that Wendell Berry creates. I can feel the rhythm of life in Port William and in the world in the construction of his narrative. And, for me, that is what makes for great writing; when the most powerful things said by a book are not found in the actual words on the page. There is something that lies beneath, something that comes through but is never said, never directly written. The writing itself and the characters are so true, so genuinely brought forth, that the point is made and the most important questions are asked.
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