Read Online A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) by Wendell Berry - Free Book Online

that trip, for the bull went into every side road and through every
open gate he came to. Or else our father sent us to have some pleasure
that he was too busy to have himself but that he imagined we could have
if only he appointed us to have it and described it suggestively enough:
He knew where we could catch a mess of fish or find a covey of birds, and
he would tell us not only how to conduct the adventure he had in mind
but also how to enjoy it.
    Sometimes, later, he would say, as if thinking aloud, how much his
interest and enthusiasm had been damaged by Uncle Andrew's death,
how that had baffled and delayed him, and I knew that this was so. He
regretted bitterly and always the loss of Uncle Andrew, and of that part
of his own life that he felt had gone with Uncle Andrew to the grave. But
if he was damaged, he was not destroyed; he still had more than half his
life to live, and he was a farmer to the end.
    Now, looking back after all my years of thinking about the two of
them, I cannot help wondering how satisfactorily their partnership might
have continued if Uncle Andrew had lived. I know that my father knew
that Uncle Andrew was wild -I am pretty sure that he knew the extent
of his wildness and what it involved-and yet my father spoke even less
of that than of his grief. At the time of Uncle Andrew's death, he and my father had been partners for something like four years. As far as I know,
it had gone well enough. Perhaps Uncle Andrew would have proved
responsible enough and my father patient enough for their partnership
to have endured-who could know? I know only that after Uncle
Andrew's death my father suffered not only a lost reality but also a damaged dream. It was a dream bound to sustain damage and to cause pain,
and yet he never gave it up, and he passed it on. He dreamed, simply, of a
world intact, the family together, the place cared for, and all well.

    Perhaps without much awareness that he was doing it, or why, he transferred his dream of partnership to Henry and me. Because he needed so
much for us to share his interests, his demands on us were often burdening and overburdening, though they taught us much that we needed to
know. In spite of his impatience and his sometimes immense exasperation at our shortcomings, he gave us also his love for the ordinary excellences of farming and of life outdoors, and his extraordinary pleasure
in them. He could be absorbed and exalted in watching a herd of cattle
graze or a red fox crossing a field.
    In his eagerness to have us learn and to fill us with experience, he put
us into the hands of other teachers. Often, in the summer or on weekends, he would take us with him on his morning rounds and just leave
us wherever work was going on.
    "Here," he would say to Jake Branch, for often it would be Jake with
whom he left us. "Put 'em to work."
    And to us he would say, "I want you to work and I want you to mind.
Listen to Jake and do what he tells you."
    "Jake," he would say, "make 'em do. Make 'em mind."
    And Jake would say, "Aw, Mr. Wheeler, don't you worry about them
boys. Them boys is all right. Me and them boys get along."
    My father would touch the accelerator then, and be on his way.

    Everything was different at Jake's and Minnie's without Uncle Andrew.
It was quieter and plainer than it had been, and it was sad. As elsewhere, little was said about Uncle Andrew in his absence. Even Minnie, who
talked easily about anything, would speak his name with care, as if both
eager and reluctant to remember him. But it was Minnie who told me
the little that I knew for many years about Uncle Andrew's last day.

    'Andrew," she said, as if announcing her topic, "he come here that
morning to bring Ab home. Ab got his hand cut, it was a bad cut, Andrew
taken him to the doctor and then brought him here. And I'm here to tell
you, Andrew knowed then that something was going to happen to him.
He knowed it. He said he felt bad, and could he have