The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092112
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

When he has eaten, seeing him pick up his hat again from the chair by the door, Margaret says, “You’re not going to take your nap?”

“No,” he says, for he has decided to walk that length of the boundary line that runs down Shade Branch. And he has stepped beyond the feeling that he is going to do it because he should. He is going to do it because he wants to. “I got something yet I have to do.”

He means to go on out the door without looking back. But he knows that she is watching him, worried about him, and he goes back to her and gives her a hug. “It’s all right, my old girl,” he says. He stands with his arms around her, who seems to him to have changed almost while he has held her from girl to wife to woman to mother to grandmother to great-grandmother. There in the old room where they have been together so long, ready again to leave it, he thinks, “I am an old man now.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m feeling good.”

He does feel good, for an old man, and once outside, he puts the house behind him and his journey ahead of him. At the barn he takes from its nail in the old harness room a stout stockman’s cane. He does not need a cane yet, and he is proud of it, but as a concession to Margaret he has decided to carry one today.

When he lets himself out through the lot gate and into the open, past the barn and the other buildings, he can see the country lying under the sun. Nearby, on his own ridges, the crops are young and growing, the pastures are lush, a field of hay has been raked into curving windrows. Inlets of woods, in the perfect foliage of the early season, reach up the hollows between the ridges. Lower down, these various inlets join in the larger woods embayed in the little valley of Shade Branch. Beyond the ridges and hollows of the farm he can see the opening of the river valley, and beyond that the hills on the far side, blue in the distance.

He has it all before him, this place that has been his life, and how lightly and happily now he walks out again into it! It seems to him that he has cast off all restraint, left all encumbrances behind, taking only himself and his direction. He is feeling good. There has been plenty of rain, and the year is full of promise. The country looks promising. He thinks of the men he knows who are at work in it: the Coulter brothers and Nathan, Nathan’s boy, Mattie, Elton Penn, and Mat’s grandson, Bess’s and Wheeler’s boy, Andy Catlett. They are at Elton’s now, he thinks, but by midafternoon they should be back here, baling the hay.

Carrying the cane over his shoulder, he crosses two fields, and then, letting himself through a third gate, turns right along the fencerow that will lead him down to Shade Branch.

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