The Memory of Old Jack. Wendell Berry
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of stock from the pastures, the occasional bawling of a cow. He has heard the tractors start, the wagons lumbering to the fields.
Though tractors draw them now, not horses and mules, the sound of the wagons going out is the same as always. Now there is the alien commotion of iron and fire, but within it or under it there is the old rattling and pounding of the empty wagon beds against the bolsters, hurrying out over the rough farm roads in the cool of the morning. As he listened there passed and passed again across the gaze of his memory a good team of mules that he bought as three-year-olds from Graham Foresee in the September of 1888.
They were a team of black, mealy-nosed mare mules with plenty of size and depth of body with a lot of lift in their motion, matched well every way. Beck and Kate. As though the reins are in his hands and he stands again on the rattling wagon, they are carrying him to the field. The sun is just coming up. It is the fall of the year. The mules are in good flesh, the hair glossy on them, and they are fresh from the night. They step together in the harness with an eager lightness that for a moment shortens his breath.
They were the first team of their quality that he ever owned. They were, maybe, an extravagance. He bought them because he needed a team, no question about that. But he bought as carefully as he did, and paid the price he paid, in a kind of celebration of himself. He had owned his place then—or owned the debt his father had left on it—for three years. And though he had not yet cleared the farm of debt, he was clearing it. He was going to clear it. There was no longer any doubt in him about his ability to do that. It had become plain to him that he was equal to what would be required of him and to what he would require of himself.
And so he bought the mules. He hunted until he found a pair that he could look at and use with the satisfaction of fulfilled judgment, and he paid what was necessary He went on horseback to get them one Saturday evening after work, and led them home in the dark of the night. He missed a dance to go get them, and when something reminded him of it two or three days later he added that to the price.
The next day he could not stay away from the barn. He led the team out after breakfast and groomed them and stood them together in the barn lot. On his own ground they still looked well to him. They suited him.
In the afternoon he brought them out again and hitched them in the driveway of the barn and busied himself repairing and adjusting a set of harness for them. Though he is at the end now, looking back at the beginning, the pleasure of that work and what it anticipated comes to him again and fills his mind.
He is sitting in the doorway of the harness room, the wide front entrance of the barn standing open at his left so that he can look out across the barn lot at the back of the old house standing gray among its trees. His knife, a punch, and several thongs of rawhide lie on the bench beside him. A breeze draws through the driveway. Used as he is to the expansive labor of the fields, he is enjoying the smallness and neatness of this task.
He hears a horse’s shod hoof strike rock and looks up to see Ben Feltner coming around the house on a gray mare; Mat, Ben’s five-year-old son, is coming along behind him on a pony Ben is married to Nancy the only one of Jack’s sisters who was still at home when he was born and who in the years after their mother died gave him most of his upbringing. It was Nancy who encouraged Jack to buy their home place, and Ben who went on his note at the bank. A large, gentle man with the beard and eyes of a patriarch though he is not yet fifty Ben Feltner is a widely respected farmer and citizen. He has a provident, retentive mind, the exacting judgment of a stockman, a brief, dry wit.
If Nancy was Jack’s mother after his real mother died when he was five, it could be said that both after and for a good many years before the death of his real father when Jack was eighteen, Ben stood before him as a father. That was never a declared relationship. Jack was too old and too proud by the time of his father’s death to accept openly a paternal authority that he had not been born under, and Ben was not the sort to give advice that had not been asked for. But Ben was the man Jack watched and listened to and checked his judgment against. There were times when Jack would outline a problem, as if hypothetically and Ben would say carefully what he thought “a fellow” ought to do in such a circumstance.
Since he signed Jack’s note for the purchase of the farm, Ben has said simply nothing at all about it. The visits he has made to Jack’s place have been casual, to the point of whatever business brought him, never taking him farther than the barn. But Jack has known that he has been watched, and he has had the feeling during the last several months that he is being watched with approval. All this is characteristic of Ben, who understands the enthusiasms that pertain to beginnings, and who has therefore, in his offhand way, deferred judgment for nearly three years.
For a while they pass the time of day there in front of the barn. Jack leads out the new team of mules, and they look at them and talk about them. But Ben does not get off his horse. He has come at last, Jack realizes, to see for himself. He was getting ready to go look up his stock, Jack says. Do they want to come along? He saddles his horse and they ride together, the two men followed by the boy on the pony out the ridge behind the barn. Letting the horses loaf along through the bright, hot afternoon, they ride over all the fields, examining the condition of the ground, the crops, the pasture, the stock, the fences and buildings. Though Jack speaks of what he has done and is doing and what he hopes to do, Ben says little. Occasionally he asks a question or speaks to his mare or points something out to Mat. At times they ride along in silence. But Jack is aware that within the shadow of his hat brim Ben’s eyes are seeing and considering everything.
They stop to let Mat have a swim in a little pool walled up in Jack’s grandfather’s time to catch the outflow of a spring. Jack and Ben hitch the horses and come and sit on the broad, moss-edged capstones of the wall in the shade of a huge sycamore. There comes upon them a deep pleasure in the leisurely afternoon. After Mat has dried himself in the sun and dressed and come to sit between them on the wall, they stay on, watching the little fish that live in the pool and the dragonflies that hover over it. Outside the shade of the old tree the afternoon burns bright on the slopes of the pasture.
As the day cools toward sundown they ride back to the barn. Jack dismounts at the door and speaks a few jocular parting words to Mat. And then he turns to Ben, whose eyes—pleased, and in their distant way perhaps amused—are looking at him now. “Jack, my boy, you’re doing all right.” He touches the mare then and turns her, Mat following, and starts home. Jack watches them out of sight.
Though he stands leaning on his cane on the porch of the hotel in Port William, looking out into the first cool morning of September, 1952, he is not there. He is four miles and sixty-four years away in the time when he had music in him and he was light. From the height of that time his mind comes down to him, a bird to the head of a statue, and another day of his old age lights the street. The chill has gone deep in him now. He will go down to Jasper Lathrop’s store, where, though it is too early in the season yet to expect a fire, some of yesterday’s warmth will have been held overnight. Smiting the edge of the porch sharply with his cane as if to set hard reality on the alert, taking careful sight on the stone steps, he lets himself heavily down.
Two: Ben
When Mat Feltner walked out into his front pasture in the course of his morning chores, he saw Old Jack standing on the hotel porch like the monument of some historical personage. It was still gray then, and he could only dimly make out the figure of the old man within the shadow of the porch roof.
Later, bringing the milk to the house, he looks again, and then he stands and looks, for Old Jack is still there as before, the dawn having come upon him.
Mat’s grandson, Andy Catlett, who has been feeding and watering the hogs, comes quietly into the yard and stands beside him.
“How’s the boy?” Mat says. And then, remembering that this is Andy’s last day to be there—tomorrow he will be going away to school—Mat reaches his arm around the boy’s shoulders and hugs him. They stand so for another moment, silently looking at Old Jack, who is looking away.
“Well,” Mat says, as if to end a conversation of some length, “let’s go eat breakfast.”
They