The Memory of Old Jack. Wendell Berry
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Table of Contents
Eleven : Here We Leave Him to His Rest
WENDELL BERRY
The Collected Stories
Jayber Crow
The Memory of Old Jack
A Place on Earth
Three Novellas
Also by Wendell Berry
FICTION
The Discovery of Kentucky
Fidelity
Nathan Coulter
A Place on Earth
Remembering
Two More Stories of the Port William Membership
Watch with Me
The Wild Birds
A World Lost
POETRY
The Broken Ground
Clearing
Collected Poems: 1957-1982
The Country of Marriage
Entries
Farming: A Hand Book
Findings
Openings
A Part
Sabbaths
Sayings and Doings
The Selected Poems
A Timbered Choir
Traveling at Home (with prose)
The Wheel
ESSAYS
Another Turn of the Crank
A Continuous Harmony
The Gift of Good Land
Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work
The Hidden Wound
Home Economics
Recollected Essays: 1965-1980
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community
Standing by Words
The Unforseen Wilderness
The Unsettling of America
What Are People For?
I made this book for my father, its true source, in gratitude and in celebration
Author’s Note
When I began to write about the people of the imagined community of Port William in 1955, I had no idea that I would still be writing about them in 1999. I had no plan, and I still don’t.
Having had no plan, I have made “errors” of genealogy and geography that I haven’t been aware of until readers (more alert and responsible than I am) have pointed them out to me.
In this new edition of The Memory of Old Jack, I have made some changes to correct those errors, and some changes merely to improve my editing.
Nothing of substance has been changed. Neither in this book nor in my thoughts have I qualified my loyalty to this old man and his hard-earned, beautiful knowledge.
One: Light
Since before sunup Old Jack has been standing at the edge of the hotel porch, gazing out into the empty street of the town of Port William, and now the sun has risen and covered him from head to foot with light. But not yet with warmth, and in spite of his heavy sheepskin coat he has grown cold. He pays that no mind. When he came out and stopped there at the top of the steps, mindful of the way the weight of his body is taking him, he propped it carefully with his cane and, in the way that has lately grown upon him, left it.
From the barn whose vaned cupola was visible over the house roof against the pale sky, Mat Feltner was calling his cows. Old Jack listened with an eagerness that carried him away from himself; for all his consciousness of where he was, he might have been asleep and dreaming. Mat waited, and called again. And then from the quieting of Mat’s voice, Old Jack knew that the cows had come near and that Mat could see them moving up deliberative and shadowy out of the mists and the thinning darkness. And then he heard the barn doors slide open.
Except for the crowing now and then of roosters, the little town and its outskirts were quiet. Old Jack’s mind was with Mat there in the barn, stirring about the lives of animals. He knew the solitude that Mat had entered at the beginning of every workday since his son was killed in the war. He knew the stiffness and pain that the tobacco cutting had placed in Mat’s back and shoulders and hands. He was aware of the deep somnolence of the hayricks in the loft of the barn.
The old man stood on the porch in the chill whitening of the dawn, empty of himself as a public statue, while all in him that had kept most alive lived in the waking barn with Mat. And he has continued to stand there while the cries of roosters have flared and flared again across the ridges, and the daylight and then the