That Distant Land by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Where Did They Go? (1947)

For every day he lived, my father could imagine two or three others that he would like to live if he did not have to do what he had to do. “Your father,” my mother used to say to my brother and me, to explain him to us, “has eyes bigger than his stomach.” We understood that, and it did not seem strange to us that most of our mornings, on school-year weekends and in summer, would begin with a summons to the bathroom where our father would be shaving and thinking. “Andy!” he would say. “Henry! Come here, boys.”

As we stood at his elbows, he would describe for us in detail a day, impossible for himself, that he nonetheless had in mind. Some would be workdays, and he would talk his way through a set of little jobs at the farm that he did not have time to do himself, anticipating problems, solutions, and incidental satisfactions. Others were pleasure days, and he would tell us how he thought a certain pond or the holes in a certain creek might be successfully fished, or where there was a hickory tree loaded with nuts, or where we might find a covey of birds. As he hurriedly applied the lather to his face, shaved, and dressed for his day at the office, he would loiter over the details: from what direction to approach the covey, how to manage the dog; what kind of pole and what kind of bait to use, by the roots of which old tree we should drop in our lines. The workday instructions were orders. The others were suggestions; he was telling us what he would do if he were us and had the happiness of living that day outside the demands of his particular life. We were to be his delegates to the great realm of possibility.

Of course, the world and the imagination being what they are, we often failed him—mismanaged his instructions, or refused to take his suggestions. But his was a practical imagination, and sometimes we succeeded. Even when we failed them, his imaginings remained with us, so that we inherited from him early his abounding sense of the possibilities of the countryside lying around our ancestral town of Port William. After forty years I can recollect, as vividly as if they had happened, a number of hunting and fishing jaunts that he imagined and none of us ever made.

Thus it was news but no surprise to me when he called me into the bathroom one May morning in 1947 to tell me that I was to work for Jake Branch that summer as a hired hand. My father had bought the old Mack Crayton place in 1940, and Jake and Minnie Branch had come there to do the farming and to shelter and feed their large and ever-larger family—“the multitude,” as my father called it. The Crayton place had been badly run down; my father had bought it partly because of his vision of how it would look cleaned up and put to rights.

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