Under the Covers Selected Works of Wendell Berry
In this book, you will be walked through how Wendell Berry juxtaposes the grandness of the forces of nature that are out of our control and helpless people at times of natural disasters to show the limited feelings we get.
We like having control in what we do. However, with natural disasters we feel helpless, insecure, and are reminded of how trivial our powers are to those of nature.
Under the Covers Selected Works of Wendell Berry
Map of
Port William
THE
RIVE R Hargrave (10 miles)
Keith (Later Chatham) Kate Helen Branch
Dick Watson & Aunt Sarah Jane
Dawe’s Landing
Elton Penn’ Rowanberry Birthplace
Nathan Coulter
“The Grandstand”
Thad Coulter Ellis
Mc Innis Catlett Home Place Beechum (Later Penn)
Jarrat Coulter
PORT WILLIAM
Not to scale.
Jayber Crow’s
Camp House (Ernest Finley’s, then Burley Coulter’s, then Jayber Crow’s)
The Nest Egg
slue
Aunt Marthy & Uncle Ben Fewclothes
Dark Tom Cotman
Barn
Thripple Coulter Home Place
Crop
Squire’s Landing Woolfork
’s
Willow run School
Elton Penn lived here as a boy, and again ater he married Roger Merchant
Flora & Andy Catlett
Goforth Churth, School, and Store
...as if the sun
h ad
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A Jonquil for Mary Penn Daylight was full in the windows now. Mary made herself get up and extinguish the lamp on the table. The lamps all needed to be cleaned and trimmed and refilled, and she had planned to do that today. The whole house needed to be dusted and swept. And she had mending to do. She tied a scarf around her head, put on her coat, and went out. Only day before yesterday it had been spring-warm, sunny, and still. Elton said the wildflowers were starting up in the leafless woods, and she found a yellow crocus in the yard. And then this dry and bitter wind had come, driving down from the north as if it were as long and wide as time, and the sky was as gray as if the sun had never shone. The wind went through her coat, pressed her fluttering skirt tight against her legs, tore at her scarf.
It chilled her to the bone. She went first to the privy in a back corner of the yard and then on to the hen house, where she shelled corn for the hens and gave them fresh water. On her way back to the house she stood a moment, looking off in the direction in which she knew Elton and Walter Cotman were plowing. By now they would have accepted even this day as it was; by now they might have shed their jackets. Later they would go in and wash and sit down in Thelma’s warm kitchen for their dinner, hungry, glad to be at rest for a little while before going back again to work through the long afternoon. Though they were not far away, though she could see them in her mind’s eye, their day and hers seemed estranged, divided by great distance and long time.
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OU When she got back into the house, she was shivering, her teeth chattering. She unbuttoned her coat without taking it off and sat down close to the stove. They heated only two rooms, the kitchen and the front room where they slept. The stove in the front room might be warmer, she thought, and she could sit in the rocking chair by it; but having already sat down, she did not get up. She had much that she needed to be doing, she told herself. She ought at least to get up and make the bed. And she wanted to tend to the lamps; it always pleased her to have them clean. But she did not get up. The stove’s heat drove the cold out of her clothes, and gradually her shivering stopped.
for wages to buy groceries, but the times were hard and he could not always find work. Sometimes their meals consisted of biscuits and a gravy made of lard and flour.
They had had a hard enough time of it their first winter. They had no fuel, no food laid up. Elton had raised a crop but no garden. He borrowed against the crop to buy a meat hog. He cut and hauled in firewood. He worked
Elton could make the funny things happen again in the dark as they lay in bed at night; sometimes they would laugh until their eyes were wet with tears. When they got snowed in that winter, they would drive the old car down the
And yet they were often happy. Often the world afforded them something to laugh about. Elton stayed alert for anything that was funny and brought the stories home. He told her how the tickle-ass grass got into Uncle Isham’s pants, and how Daisy Hample clucked to her nearsighted husband and children like a hen with halfgrown chicks, and how Jonah Hample, missing the steps, walked off the edge of Braymer Hardy’s front porch, fell into a rosebush, and said, “Now, I didn’t go to do that!”
G hill until it stalled in the drifts, and drag it out with the team, and ram it into the drifts again, laughing until the horses looked at them in wonder. When the next year came,they began at the beginning, and though the times had not im- proved, they improved themselves. They bought a few hens and a rooster from Josie Braymer. They bought a second cow. They put in a garden. They bought two shoats to raise for meat. Mary learned to preserve the food they would need for winter. When the cows freshened, she learned to milk. She took a small bucket of cream and a few eggs to Port William every Saturday night and used the money she made to buy groceries and to pay on their debts. Slowly she learned to imagine where she was. The ridge named for Walter Cotman’s family is a long one, curving out toward the river between the two creek valleys of Willow Run and Katie’s
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Branch. As it comes near to the river valley it gets narrower, it’s sides steeper and more deeply incised by hollows. When Elton and Mary Penn were making their beginning there, the uplands were divided into many farms, few of which contained as much as a hundred acres. The hollows, the steeper hillsides, the bluffs along the sides of the two creek valleys were covered with thicket or woods. From where the hawks saw it, the ridge would have seemed a long, irregular promontory reaching out into a sea of trees. And it bore on its back crisscrossings of other trees along the stone or rail or wire fences, trees in thickets and groves, trees in the houseyards. And on rises of ground or tucked into folds were the gray, paintless buildings of the farmsteads, connected to one another by lanes and paths. Now she thought of herself as belonging there, not just because of her marriage to Elton but also because of the economy that the
N
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February 2, 1968 In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
E two of them had made around themselves and with their neighbors. She had learned to think of herself as living and working at the center of a wonderful provisioning: the kitchen and garden, hog pen and smokehouse, henhouse and cellar of her own household; the little commerce of giving and taking that spoked out along the paths connecting her household to the others; Port William on its ridgetop in one direction, Goforth in its valley in the other; and all this at the heart of the weather and the world. On a bright, still day in the late fall, after all the leaves were down, she had stood on the highest point and had seen the six smokes of the six houses rising straight up into the wide downfalling light. She knew which smoke came from which house. It was like watching the rising up of prayers or some less acknowledged communication between Earth and Heaven. She could not say to herself how it
made her feel. She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath, the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after week. But today these things seemed precious and far away, as if remembered from another world or another life. Her sickness made things seem arbitrary and awry. Nothing had to be the way it was. As easily as she could see the house as it was, she could imagine it empty, windowless, the tin roof blowing away, the chimneys crumbling, the cellar caved in, weeds in the yard. She could imagine Elton and herself gone, and the rest of them-Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and Quail-gone too.
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Compromise, Hell! WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY-I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so. We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all-by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians-be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so, and we reward them for it.
We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing. Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes-the farms and ranches and working forests-and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conser-
March 22, 1968
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vationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work. Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper,nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don’t uphold the health of the land and the people and the people’s work.
As spring begins the river rises, filling like the sorrow of nations -uprooted trees, soil of squandered mountains, the debris of kitchens, all passing seaward. At dawn snow began to fall. The ducks, moving north, pass like shadows through the falling white. The jonquils, half open, bend down with its weight. The plow freezes in the furrow. In the night I lay awake, thinking of the river rising, the spring heavy with official meaningless deaths.
It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.
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For the Rebuilding of a House To know the inhabiting reasons of trees and streams, old men who shed their lives on the world like leaves, I watch them go.
 And I go. I build the place of my leaving. The days arc into vision
 like fish leaping, their shining caught in the stream. I watch them go in homage and sorrow. I build the place of my dream. I build the place of my leaving that the dark may come clean.
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Along the river croplands and gardens s. are buried in the flood, airy places grown dark d ir and silent beneath it. Under the slender branch holding the new nest of the hummingbird the river flows heavy with earth, the water 
 turned the color of broken slopes. I stand
 deep in the mud of the shore, a stake planted to measure the rise, the water rising, the earth falling to meet it. A great cottonwood passes down, the leaves shivering as the roots drag the bottom. I was not ready for this parting, my native land putting out to sea.
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Wendell Berry Born in August 5, 1934 Wendell Berry is an American novelist, a farmer, environmentalist, and poet. His works consist of vast number of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. His writings reflect his beliefs in values in life. The simplicity of life with pleasure from healthy environment, agriculture, community, attachment to places, adequate technologies, moderation, and gratification from very small things in daily life were his definition of values in life. Wendell Berry lives and farms with his family in Henry County, Kentucky, and is the author of more than thirty books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Among his novels (set in the fictional community of Port William Kentucky) are Nathan Coulter (1960), A Place on Earth (1967), and The Memory of Old Jack (1974); short story collections include The Wild Birds (1986), Remembering (1988), Fidelity (1993), and Watch With Me (1994); collections of essays
include, among many others, A Continuous Harmony (1972), The Unsettling of America (1977), Recollected Essays (1981), and Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community (1993); and among his many volumes of poetry are A Part (1980), The Wheel (1982), Collected Poems (1985) and Entries (1984). Berry’s life, his farm work, his writing and teaching, his home and family, and all that each involves are extraordinarily integrated. He understands his writing as an attempt to elucidate certain connections, primarily the interrelationships and interdependencies of man and the natural world. One of his premises in The Unsettling of America at once evinces his notion of cultural and natural interdependency: “Everything in the Creation is related to everything else and dependent on everything else” (46). The Unsettling of America is about connections and thus ramifications.
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy responsibility and after all our most pleasing To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.�
ected Works l e S Fiction Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 Nathan Coulter, 1960 A Place on Earth, 1967 Remembering, 1988 That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004 Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, NĂŠe Quinch, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996 Poetry The Broken Ground, 1964 Clearing, 1977 Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982 The Country of Marriage, 1973 Entries, 1994 Farming: A Hand Book, 1970 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 A Part, 1980 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 Sayings and Doings, 1975 The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999 A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998 The Wheel, 1982
Essays Another Turn of the Crank, 1996 The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002 Citizenship Papers, 2003 A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972 The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1981 Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990 The Hidden Wound, 1970 Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987 Life Is a Miracle, 2000 The Long-Legged House, 2004 Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981 Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992 Standing by Words, 1983 The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977 What Are People For?, 1990 Biography http://www.ncteamericancollection.org/litmap/berry_wendell_ky.htm Hear him read poetry http://www.wendellberrybooks.com/audio.html
Designed by Christine Lee from Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design. Typography II “Wendell Berry Sampler� project. Hand-drawn illustrations on brown recycled paper. Typeset in Univers and Minion Pro. Dec. 4th, 2014