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

a drink of water. I
drawed a fresh bucket and give him a drink.
    "We about had dinner ready and I said, 'Here, Andrew, set down and
eat before you go back.'
    'And then he started out the back door; he come in at the front door,
bringing Ab in. I said, Andrew, it's bad luck to go in one door and out the
other.'
    "He said, 'It don't matter. It don't make any difference.'
    "He went on out the back door. And it weren't but a little while then
till he was dead.
    "He knowed something was going to happen, I'm atelling you. He
knowed it as sure as I'm setting here."
    I believed her. Her story seemed to me to show that Uncle Andrew's
death had been fated. Whether he entered into the course of his fate by
coming in and going out by different doors, as at birth and death, or by
some other way, I did not know. But I felt that on the day of his death he
had been fated to die, and that he knew it.
    Her story made me see him as he had been when he came into the
kitchen with death's shadow over him and asked her for a drink of water,
and drank, and set down the glass. I heard him say, "It don't matter. It
don't make any difference." I can hear him yet. I can see the expression
on his face as he says it. The shadow of his death is already on him. He
speaks in eternity even as he is speaking in time.
    And yet Miss Iris Flynn told me many years later that on that morning,
having left Ab with the doctor, Uncle Andrew stuck his head into the
door of the Rosebud, gave her a grin, and said, "Hi, babe!"
    But of those two glimpses of him on that day, Minnie Branch's is the
most powerful. I still raise with myself the question whether it is bad luck to come in by one door and go out by another, which I still associate
with that old darkness of fate and calamity. And when I have it on my
mind, I still go out by the same door I came in.

    Only once was I ever admitted into the unqualified presence of the family's grief. One night in the late fall of the year of Uncle Andrew's death,
I went with my father on his farm rounds after he had left the office for
the day. In the dusk of the early evening we stopped to see Grandma and
Grandpa Catlett. Grandma asked us and we stayed for supper. This was
something my father had always done from time to time, but perhaps he
had not done so since Uncle Andrew's death.
    Grandma's kitchen was not so harshly utilitarian as Minnie Branch's
- it was neater, and the chairs at the table matched - but in its furnishings
and aspect it was nonetheless a room mainly to be used. It had no fuss
about it, nothing decorative except a calendar. It was a fairly large room,
containing in addition to the table and chairs an iron cooking stove, a
small coal oil stove sometimes used in hot weather, a wood box, a flour
box, a dish cabinet, and by the back door a small wash table with water
bucket and pan and a towel made of a flour sack hanging on a nail, the nail
protruding through a carefully worked buttonhole. By then, I believe,
there would also have been a small refrigerator. The table and chairs were
old, covered with many coats of paint, the old coats chipped and cracked
beneath the new. I remember from about that time a dishpan that had a
leak and was slightly rounded on the bottom; when Grandma set it on
the hot stove it was continuously rocked by little explosions of steam. Her
fine things consisted of a set of silver teaspoons, a beautiful old painted
pitcher, and a cut-glass bowl.
    The table, covered with an oilcloth, stood under the windows on the
north wall. Cellar, smokehouse, henhouse, and garden were still live
institutions in those days. There would have been a crock of fresh milk;
Grandma would have fried a stack of corn batter cakes on the griddle;
she might have had a baked ham or a hen; the only sign of the war would
have been a scarcity of sugar.
    While we ate nobody said anything that was not necessary. I was left
out of consideration almost as much as I had been in