Read Online A Place in Time by Wendell Berry - Free Book Online Page A

she said, he needed her most.
    Uncle Peach most needed Wheeler when he was drunk and sick and helpless and broke and far from home. The automobile made this a reasonable need. No power that Wheeler had acquired in law school enabled him to argue against it, though he tried. Because he had the means of going, he had to go.
    If Uncle Peach had the money to get there, his favorite place of resort was a Louisville establishment that called itself the Hotel Stag. From the time of Wheeler’s purchase of the automobile until the time of Uncle Peach’s death, Wheeler, who would not in any circumstances have taken Uncle Peach to the Stag Hotel, went there many a time to bring him home.
    At the Stag Hotel and other places of refreshment Uncle Peach would encounter commercial ladies of great attractiveness and charm. Sometimes when Wheeler would be bringing him home, and despite his pain and exhaustion, Uncle Peach would still be enchanted, and he would confide as much to Wheeler: “Oh, them eyes!” he would say. “Oh, them eyes!”
    Many a good and funny story came of Wheeler’s missions of mercy, and also many a story of real pain and suffering that moved Wheeler to real pity, and also many moments of utter exasperation at the waste of time and effort when Wheeler, mocking himself and yet meaning every word, would cry out against “the damned Hotel Stag and every damned thing involved therein and pertaining thereto.” Or he would say of Uncle Peach indignantly, “He’s got barely enough sense to swallow.” And then he would laugh. “Burley Coulter told me he’d seen Uncle Peach drink all he could hold and then fill his mouth for later.” He would laugh. And then, affection and hopelessness and sorrow coming over him, he would shake his head. “Poor fellow.”
    In his turn, young Andy Catlett, namesake of his doomed uncle Andrew, also inherited uncle Peach from his grandmother’s lamentation and his father’s talk, from trips with his father to see that their then-failing Uncle Peach was alive and had enough to eat, and from various elders who remembered with care and delight Uncle Peach’s sayings and doings.
    One Christmastime, when he was about six, Andy overheard his fathertell Uncle Andrew, just home for the holidays, that Uncle Peach, “sleeping it off in his front yard,” had frozen several of his toes, which had then needed to be amputated.
    â€œToes!” Uncle Andrew said, laughing his big laugh. “Anybody can spare a few toes. He better be glad he didn’t freeze his pecker off.” In the midst of his sadness and exasperation Wheeler also laughed, and they went away, leaving Andy, whom they had not noticed, with a possibility he had never considered before.
    Andy had gone with his father to visit Uncle Peach after the surgery. Uncle Peach was sitting by the drum stove in his bare, bad-smelling little house with his foot wrapped in a soiled white bandage. He was talking in his old, slow voice about the hospital in Louisville, which he pronounced “Louis-ville.” Though Andy, who had seen inside a hospital, could not picture him in one, Uncle Peach had enjoyed his stay. He had admired the nurses. “Damn pretty, some of ’em,” he said to Wheeler.
    And then, studying Andy, he said, “This boy’ll be looking at ’em, ’fore you know it.”
    When Uncle Peach died in Andy’s seventh year, and they all knew that he was dead, Andy overheard his father and mother saying what a story it had been. His father said with regret and sorrow and amusement and, instead of indignation, perhaps relief, for Uncle Peach had died sober in his sleep in bed at home: “Like Jehorum, poor fellow, he has departed without being desired.” Wheeler was capable of feeling some things simply, but he never spoke of Uncle Peach with unmixed feelings.
    And then when they were all in Wheeler’s car, driving