Fidelity by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

When he returned to the road after his bath and his sleep, it was past the middle of the morning. His steps fell into their old rhythm on the blacktop.

“I know a mighty power,” he thought. “A mighty power of death and fire. An anger beyond the power of any man, made big in machines equal to many men. And a little man who has passed through mighty death and fire and still lived—what is he going to think of himself when he is back again, walking the river road below Port William, that we would have blowed all to flinders as soon as look at it if it had got in our way?”

He walked, as before, the left side of the road, not meaning to ask for rides. But as on the afternoon before, there was little traffic. He had met two cars going down toward Hargrave and had been passed by only one coming up.

Where the road began to rise toward Port William up on the ridge, a lesser road branched off to the left and ran along the floor of the valley. As Art reached this intersection, he heard a truck engine backfiring, coming down the hill, and then the truck came into sight and he recognized it. It was an old green International driven, as he expected and soon saw, by an old man wearing a trucker’s cap and smoking a pipe. The truck was loaded with fat hogs, heading for the packing plant at Jefferson. As he went by, the old man waved to Art and Art waved back.

“Sam Hanks,” he thought. “I have been gone over three years and have traveled a many a thousand miles over land and ocean, and in all that time and all them miles the first man I have seen that I have always known is Sam Hanks.”

He tried to think what person he had seen last when he was leaving, but he could not remember. He took the lesser road and, after perhaps half a mile, turned into a road still narrower, only a pair of graveled wheel tracks. A little later, when the trees were fully leaved, this would be almost a burrow, tunneling along between the creek and the hillside under the overarching trees, but now the leaves were small and the sun cast the shadows of the branches in a close network onto the gravel.

Soon he was walking below the high-water line. He could see it clearly marked on the slope to his right: a line above which the fallen leaves of the year before were still bright and below which they were darkened by their long steeping in the flood. The slope under the trees was strewn with drift, and here and there a drift log was lodged in the branches high above his head. In the shadow of the flood the spring was late, the buds of the trees just opening, the white flowers of twinleaf and bloodroot just beginning to bloom. It

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