Watch With Me by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry [Berry, Wendell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

6

turn back the bed

(1941)

To some, it seemed that Ptolemy Proudfoot didn’t laugh like a Christian. He laughed too loud and too long, and his merriment seethed just a little too self-sufficient—as if, had there been enough funny stories and enough breath to laugh at them with, he might not need to go to Heaven.

What tickled him as much as anything were his own stories about his grandfather, Mark Anthony Proudfoot, known as Ant’ny and later, of course, as Old Ant’ny. Old Ant’ny was, you might say, the Tol Proudfoot of his generation, with a few differences, the main one being that whereas Tol was childless, Old Ant’ny sired a nation of Proudfoots. Once his progeny had grown up and acquired in-laws and produced scions of their own, they seemed as numerous as the sand which is upon the seashore.

The great events of Tol’s boyhood were the family gatherings that took place three or four times a year at Old Ant’ny’s place above Goforth in the Katy’s Branch valley. By that time Ant’ny was in his old age. He had always been a big man, and now, with less activity and no loss of appetite, he had grown immense. He sat at these meetings, as massive and permanent-seeming almost as the old log house itself, holding a cane in his hand, seldom stirring from the chair that one of his sons had constructed for him out of poplar two-by-fours. He sat erect and mostly in silence, looking straight ahead, his white beard reaching down to his fourth shirt button. Now and then he would say something in a rolling deep voice that whoever was in the room would stop and listen to. And now and then he would reach out with his cane and hook a passing grandson or great-grandson, whose name and the name of whose parents he would demand to know. But for the most part he sat in silence, shedding his patriarchal influence over a circumference of about six feet, while round him the fruit of his loins revolved, battering floor and walls, like a storm.

Old Ant’ny was a provider, and he did provide. He saw to it that twelve hogs were slaughtered for his own use every fall—and twenty-four hams and twenty-four shoulders and twenty-four middlings and twenty-four spareribs and twelve backbones and hard to say how many sacks of sausage were hung in his smokehouse. And his wife, Maw Proudfoot, kept a flock of turkeys and a flock of ducks and geese and a flock of guineas, and her hen house was as populous as a county seat. And long after he was “too old to farm,” Old Ant’ny grew a garden as big as some people’s crop. He picked and dug and fetched, and Maw Proudfoot canned and preserved and pickled and salted as if they had an army to feed—which they more or less did, for there were not only the announced family gatherings but always somebody or some few happening by, and always somebody to give something to.

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