Nathan Coulter (19 page)

Before long Uncle Burley began to sing. He'd gather a fork load of hay and as he lifted it onto the shock sing, “Ohhhhhhh, ‘down along the woodland ...' ” And as he strained at the fork again: “Ohhhhhhh, ‘through the hills and by the shore . . .' ”

“You must be happy,” Daddy said.

“I was thinking about the good old days,” Uncle Burley said, “when I was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey's circus. You didn't know about that, did you?”

“Never heard of it before,” Daddy said.

Uncle Burley had invented the story about driving a team for Barnum and Bailey to tell to Brother and me when we were little, and all of us had heard it a hundred times. But when the work got hard he'd usually tell it again to make us laugh, and because he enjoyed hearing it himself. He said he'd driven a team of eight black horses with silver harness and red
plumes on their bridles. His team had drawn the calliope at the head of all the parades, and it had been a glorious sight. He told about the girl bareback riders on their white horses and the tightrope walkers and the trapeze men and the lion tamers. Finally he got fired, he said, because he whipped one of the elephants singlehanded in a fair fight. He tied the elephant's trunk to his tail and ran him around in a circle until he passed out from dizziness. Barnum and Bailey told him that he was the best teamster they'd ever had, but they just couldn't stand for him mistreating their elephants.

Daddy said he supposed it must make Uncle Burley awfully sad at times to have such fine memories of his past.

Uncle Burley shook his head. “I tell you, back in those days when I had three flunkies to polish my black boots and brush my red forked-tail coat, I never would have believed that I'd end up here, sweating on the handle of a pitchfork. It's enough to make a grown man cry.”

While we worked Grandpa sat in the shade at the edge of the field, nodding off to sleep, and waking up to carry us a fresh jug of water when we needed one.

“Look at him sleep,” Uncle Burley said. “He's living the good life, ain't he? When I get that old I want somebody to wake me up every once in a while just so I can go back to sleep again.”

“I reckon so,” Daddy said.

“I reckon so. Sleep and fish. That's all I'll do. I'll switch back and forth from maple shade to sycamore shade. And when it's chilly I'll sleep in the sun.”

Gander called dinnertime. We fed and watered the teams and went to the house. Gander filled the washpans with water and we washed our hands, then sat at the kitchen table while Mandy Loyd brought the food to us. She was young enough to have been Gander's daughter—slender and well made, and always smiling though she never talked much when we were there. It seemed strange to me that she could have married anybody as old and ugly and one-eyed as Gander. And he must have wondered about it too, because he was jealous of her and he kept her at home most of the time. It made him uncomfortable to have other men in his house; when we ate dinner with him he always clammed up, and nobody ever felt free to joke or laugh. We ate without talking except to ask for the
food, feeling as uncomfortable as Gander, and hurrying to finish the meal. Only Grandpa felt free enough to compliment Mandy on her cooking. And she smiled and thanked him.

We went back to work, and Grandpa sat in the shade again, and slept, and woke up to bring us water.

“I wish he'd stay awake,” Uncle Burley said. “It makes the shade look too cool and good when I see him sleeping in it.”

In the middle of the afternoon when Grandpa was bringing the jug from the well we saw him stagger a little. He steadied himself with the cane and came on; but when he handed the jug to us and Daddy asked him if he was all right he said he'd had a dizzy spell. He looked pale, and it would be a long time before we could quit for the day, so Daddy told me to walk home with him.

He told Grandpa that Uncle Burley had broken the handle out of his pitchfork and he was sending me to get another one. “Do you want to go along with Nathan? You'll feel better when you get home and rest a while.”

Grandpa said he'd go with me, and we started up the hill, stopping every couple of hundred yards for him to rest. Once when we stopped he said, “An old man's not worth a damn. He might as well be knocked in the head.”

He rested, and we went on again. He climbed the hill almost as fast as a young man, ashamed that I had to wait on him, until the tiredness caught up with him and he had to stop to rest.

When we came up out of the woods, the bottom spread out below us, and I could look back into Gander's hayfield where they were loading one of the wagons. From that distance the three men looked like dolls, but I could tell them apart: Daddy on top of the load, taking the hay as they pitched it to him, placing it and tramping on it; Gander leaning backward against the weight of his loaded fork, his head tilted, favoring the good eye; Uncle Burley making the whole thing into as much of a joke as the heat and strain of the work would allow, the joke ready in the set of his shoulders and in the way he walked from one shock to another as the wagon moved across the field. On the other side of the river the hills were blue, as if the sky came down in front of them.

When we got to Grandpa's spring we stopped to drink.

The water of the spring came from a notch in the rock just under the brow of the hill, and the land sloped steeply around it. The grove of oaks that stood there made the hollow a kind of room where it was always shady and cool in summer, filled with the sound of water running.

Grandpa sat on a ledge of the rock, and I dipped the drinking cup full of water and carried it to him. He drank, then held the cup in his hands, looking at the spring.

“That's a good vein of water,” he said. “Nobody ever knew it to go dry.”

I thought of the spring running there all the time, while the Indians hunted the country and while our people came and took the land and cleared it; and still running while Grandpa's grandfather and his father got old and died. And running while Grandpa drank its water and waited his turn. When I thought of it that way I knew I was waiting my turn too. But that didn't seem real. It was too far away to think about. And I saw how it would have been unreal to Grandpa for so long, and how it must have grieved him when it had finally come close enough to be known.

Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn't be divided from the days he'd spent at work in his fields. Daddy had told us we didn't know what the country would look like without him at work in the middle of it; and that was as true of Grandpa as it was of Daddy. We wouldn't recognize the country when he was dead.

After he rested we started toward the house again. We got to the top of the slope above the spring, and Grandpa stopped, holding the cane off the ground, his mouth open, staring off in the direction of the house.

“What's the matter?” I asked him.

Then he fell. He hit the ground limp, and the wind caught his hat and rolled it down the hill.

I straightened him out and knelt beside him, rubbing his hands and speaking to him. But I couldn't bring him to. The wind whistled through the grass, and the sky was hot and blue, too quiet and lonely to let him die.

I called his name, but he didn't stir. I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home.

Copyright © 2008 by Wendell Berry.

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

Copyright Conventions.

 

This book is a work of fiction. Nothing is in it that has not been imagined.

 

I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Creative Writing Center of Stanford University for a fellowship that allowed me a year of free time to work on this book, and to the
Carolina Quarterly
, which published earlier versions of two chapters.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berry, Wendell, 1934-

Nathan Coulter : a novel / Wendell Berry

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-582-43967-9

1. Port William (Ky. : Imaginary place)—Fiction.

2. Country life—Fiction. 3. Kentucky—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3552.E75N28 2008

813'.54—dc22 2007044433

 

 

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