Fidelity by Wendell Berry
Mat Feltner was my grandfather on my mother’s side. Saying it thus, I force myself to reckon again with the strangeness of that verb was. The man of whom I once was pleased to say, "He is my grandfather," has become the dead man who was my grandfather. He was, and is no more. And this is a part of the great mystery we call time. But the past is present also. And this, I think, is a part of the greater mystery we call eternity. Though Mat Feltner has been dead for twenty-five years, and I am now older than he was when I was born and have grandchildren of my own, I know his hands, their way of holding a hammer or a hoe or a set of checklines, as well as I know my own. I know his way of talking, his way of cocking his head when he began a story, the smoking pipe stem held an inch from his lips. I have in my mind, not just as a memory but as a consolation, his welcome to me when I returned home from the university and, later, from jobs in distant cities. When I sat down beside him, his hand would clap lightly onto my leg above the knee; my absence might have lasted many months, but he would say as though we had been together the day before, "Hello, Andy." The shape of his hand is printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark. This man who was my grandfather is present in me, as I felt always his father to be present in him.
When I stand in the road that passes through Port William, I am standing on the strata of my history that go down through the known past into the unknown: the blacktop rests on state gravel, which rests on county gravel, which rests on the creek rock and cinders laid down by the town when it was still mostly beyond the reach of the county; and under the creek rock and cinders is the dirt track of the town’s beginning, the buffalo trace that was the way we came.
Ben Feltner never had believed in working on Sunday, and he did not believe in not working on workdays. Those two principles had shaped all his weeks. He liked to make his hay cuttings and begin other large, urgent jobs as early in the week as possible in order to have them finished before Sunday.
Updated: Mar 17, 2023
"That mule could kick the lard out of a biscuit."
For what seemed a long time Mat knelt there with his father’s dead wrist in his hand, while his mind arrived and arrived and yet arrived at that place and time and that body lying still on the soiled and bloodied stones. When he looked up again, he did not look like the man they had known at all.
She was already wearing black. She had borne four children and raised one. Two of her children she had buried in the same week of a diphtheria epidemic, of which she had nearly died herself. After the third child had died, she never wore colors again. It was not that she chose to be ostentatiously bereaved. She could not have chosen to be ostentatious about anything. She was, in fact, a woman possessed of a strong native cheerfulness. And yet she had accepted a certain darkness that she had lived in too intimately to deny.
Her face, it seemed, had been made to smile. It was a face that assented wholly to the being of whatever and whomever she looked at.
"People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards."
Mat Feltner dealt with Ben’s murder by not talking about it and thus keeping it in the past. In his last years, I liked to get him to tell me about the violent old times of the town, the hard drinking and the fighting. And he would oblige me up to a point, enjoying the outrageous old stories himself, I think. But always there would come a time in the midst of the telling when he would become silent, shake his head, lift one hand and let it fall; and I would know—I know better now than I did then—that he had remembered his father’s death.
As soon as the porch was cleared, he retrieved his hat from the hall tree and walked quietly out across the yard under the maples and the descending night. So as not to be waylaid by talk, he walked rapidly down the middle of the road to where he had tied his horse. Lamps had now been lighted in the stores and the houses. As he approached, his horse nickered to him. "I know it," Jack said. As soon as the horse felt the rider’s weight in the stirrup, he started. Soon the lights and noises of the town were behind them, and there were only a few stars, a low red streak in the west, and the horse’s eager footfalls on the road.
Updated: Apr 10, 2023
He put sugar and cream in his coffee and stirred rapidly with the spoon. Now he lingered a little. He did not indulge himself often, but this was one of his moments of leisure. He gave himself to his pleasures as concentratedly as to his work. He was never partial about anything; he never felt two ways at the same time. It was, she thought, a kind of childishness in him. When he was happy, he was entirely happy, and he could be as entirely sad or angry.
His glooms were the darkest she had ever seen. He worked as a hungry dog ate, and yet he could play at croquet or cards with the self-forgetful exuberance of a little boy. It was for his concentratedness, she supposed, if such a thing could be supposed about, that she loved him. That and her yen just to look at him, for it was wonderful to her the way he was himself in his slightest look or gesture.
Though he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew, had already possessed him; its momentum was on him. When he rose from bed in the morning, he stepped into the day’s work, impelled into it by the tension, never apart from him, between what he wanted to do and what he could do.
This morning, delaying his own plowing, he was going to help Walter Cotman plow his corn ground. She could feel the knowledge of what he had to do tightening in him like a spring.
She had never seen anybody like him. He had a wild way of rejoicing, like a healthy child, singing songs, joking, driving his old car as if he were drunk and the road not wide enough. He could make her weak with laughing at him. And yet he was already a man as few men were. He had been making his own living since he was fourteen, when he had quit school. His father had been dead by then for five years. He had hated his stepfather. When a neighbor had offered him crop ground, room, and wages, he had taken charge of himself and, though he was still a boy, he had become a man. He wanted, he said, to have to say thank you to nobody. Or to nobody but her. He would be glad, he said with a large grin, to say thank you to her.
She knew he would rather die than be beaten. It was maybe not the best way to be, she thought, but it was the way he was, and she loved him. It was both a trouble and a comfort to her to know that he would always require the most of himself. And he was beautiful, the way he moved in his work. It stirred her. She could feel ambition constantly pressing in him. He could do more than he had done, and he was always looking for the way. He was like an axman at work in a tangled thicket, cutting and cutting at the brush and the vines and the low limbs, trying to make room for a full swing.
She had learned that she could do, and do well and gladly enough, whatever she would have to do. She had no fear.
Her parents’ pride was social, belonging, even in its extremity, to their kind and time. But Elton’s pride was merely creaturely, albeit that of an extraordinary creature; it was a creature’s naked claim on the right to respect itself, a claim that no creature’s life, of itself, could invariably support.
At his best, Elton was a man in love—with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house.
Updated: Apr 15, 2023
And then he heard his father’s voice riding up in his throat as he had never heard it, and he saw that his father had turned to the boy and was speaking to him: "Honey, run yonder to the house. Tell your granny to set on another plate. For we have our own that was gone and has come again."