GRACE

If I were forced to read one thing only for the rest of my life, I would choose the fiction of Wendell Berry. There is no doubt about it. I have traveled around in his made-up world of Port William for a long time now, and I will have no trouble living there in my mind for a longer time to come. It moves me so.

Berry has been writing of the Port William Membership since 1960 with the publication of Nathan Coulter. Fifty-two years later, I found myself wandering around a favorite bookstore in Boone, North Carolina and happening upon his latest collection of stories from Port William, A Place in Time. Wendell Berry is now seventy-eight years old and it stands to reason that this could very well be his last book of the Membership, as the Port William community is known, though the quality of the work is certainly no indicator. In my own amateur opinion, it is some of his best ever. But, it does read as a benediction, particularly the last story, which lends its name to the entire collection. And there were times when I could not help but think I was reading a story that Berry felt he must get down before his time has come and gone, a sort of, Oh, yes, there was this, too, that I must not forget to tell about.

Just last night, while talking with my wife about the richness of this world Berry has brought forth, the long and detailed history of it that he has given us, I professed my amazement at its vastness. From where does such a wellspring come? It is obvious as you come to know these characters that Berry himself seems to see it all mostly through the eyes of Andy Catlett, whose own history resembles Berry's most closely and who is known by all as one of the rememberers in that community. I cannot help but wonder sometimes if Berry draws on his own story and on the stories of his family and neighbors. It really does not matter, of course, because Port William is altogether a real place of its own now. But, the sheer breadth of the tale Berry has for so long been spinning is mightily impressive and even more so to me if it comes solely from within himself. His character of Andy Catlett was born in 1934, which means he comes of age just at the crucial moment upon which Berry's larger story turns: the transition from the agrarian, pre-War economy to the post-War, industrial one. One world was ending and a new one was taking its place. Andy Catlett was born into the old one and lived to see it replaced, though he remains loyal to the old. As he says himself in the title story of this collection, "It is hard to remember one world while living in another."

This is part of what connects me most to fictional Port William. I see myself as an Andy Catlett. A few years ago I stood on a windy, fall day in a churchyard while the last of my grandmother's brothers was put into that ground for his final rest. He had been one of the real characters in my own life and I cannot help but think of him as I do Wendell Berry's Burley Coulter. "That Burley, now, he's in a class by hisself. There's stories about him that nobody's going to tell you . . . or anyhow I ain't, but I wish you could know him." I grieved for my great uncle on that day, of course, but he had lived a life long and full, in pure spite of the wildness of it. His funeral was occasion more to mark his long survival on this earth than his passing away from it. My grief, then, was larger for the passing away of something greater than one person. My grandmother, the youngest of her twelve siblings who were born over the span of more than twenty years at the beginning of the last century, remains now the last living of them. I have watched her stand stoic at many a funeral, but standing beside her as we listened to the preacher on that day, I felt the rattle of her sobbing, felt her lean into me for support. I think she, too, felt what I did. We knew we were witnessing the passing away of a people and a way of living the likes of which will not be known again in this world. It is a world, as Wendell Berry writes, that is "the old life of home farms and frugality and neighborhood and care-taking . . ."

This all begs a certain question, of course. Is it all about nostalgia, some sort of longing for simpler days gone by? I have thought much about this one troubling aspect of Berry's fictional world. Is it romanticized? Too idyllic and pastoral somehow? It is easy to feel this way at times. Everyone in Port William, on the surface at least, seems to be wise and loving and neighborly and calm. Part of this is the way Berry writes it. His words read like an elegy, a kind of prayer. Oh, but in Port William, too, there is certainly suffering and death, feuding and flaring tempers and so many sorrows and unanswered questions. There are drinkers, loners, adulterers, back-sliders and gamblers. And daily life turns around hard, blistering, back-crunching work. In the face of its tranquility, where most people still break open their fields behind a team of mules, it is as difficult a place as is any other. The long, long story of Port William, after all, is about the destruction of a world. There is no other way to put it. Even as Burley Coulter laughs and winks and tells us another story about a time he and Big Ellis and Jayber Crow got drunk, there is a sadness. We feel the impending doom, the slow, seeping loss of something larger than ourselves.

But, there is this: coursing its way through it all is grace.  Strength in the face of hardship, elemental human kindness to match the troubles of this world, blessed reprieve in spite of the wearisome toil. And there is the place. Berry writes of a how a place continually tells the story of itself to itself. The members of the place are admitted freely into its conversation, lifted up and carried on it, but the conversation does not begin on human lips. While they are a part of it, though, all of them, the good and the bad, are members and neighbors among and to one another. Wendell Berry's story of Port William is the story of us. But, I do not think there is a sense of fatalism. I think, in the end, in Port William and in this other world, grace and redemption will somehow prevail. It may not be in a way we can imagine or that even includes us as we know ourselves, but the story will continue to tell itself.