Wendell Berry

Dissonance and Harmony

A selection of works by Wendell Berry

WENDE

ELL Berry

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. 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.

Berry's work is an ongoing exploration of man's use of and relationship to the land, and his writing constitutes, as Gary Tolliver has said, one man's "continuing search for avenues of reentry into a proper state of harmony with the natural world".

The traditional community is one of Berry's central metaphors for cultural and natural harmony. Such a community is a highly intricate alliance in which individuals fun-ction as "parts" of a membership, each depending on and affecting all the others.

The traditional community, like the traditional farms within it, is a model of interdependency.

ON THE HILL

AT

LATE

NIGHT The ripe grassheads bend in the starlight in the soft wind, beneath them the darkness of the grass, fathomless, the long blades rising out of the well of time. Cars travel the valley roads below me, their lights finding the dark, and racing on. Above their roar is a silence I have suddenly heard, and felt the country turn under the stars toward dawn. I am wholly willing to be here between the bright silent thousands of stars and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.

The hill has grown to me like a foot.

Until I lift the earth I cannot move.

Local Knowledge In 1983, reviewing a book of agricultural essays by Wes Jackson and one by me, Lewis Hyde suggested that our two books were part of an effort of the periphery to be heard by the center. This has stayed in my mind as perhaps the most useful thing that has been said about my agricultural writing and that of my allies.

It is useful because the dichotomy between center and periphery does in fact exist, as does the tendency of the center to be ignorant of the periphery.

These terms appear to be plain enough, but as I am going to use them here they may need a little clarification. We can say, for example, that a land grant university is a center with a designated periphery which it is supposed to maintain and improve. Or an industrial city is a center with a periphery which it is bound to influence and which, according to its politics and its power, it may either conserve or damage. Or a national or a state government is a center solemnly entrusted with responsibility for peripheral places, but in general it extends its protections and favors to the commercial centers, which outvote or out-“contribute” the periphery. But above all, now, as a sort of center

Inform

of centers, is the global “free marker” economy of the great corporations, the periphery of which is everywhere, and for its periphery this center expresses no concern and acknowledges no responsibility.

The global economy is a developmentit is intended apparently as the culmination of the technological and commercial colonialist orthodoxy that has dominated the world increasingly since the Renaissance, the principle of the orthodoxy being that any commercial entity is entitled to wealth according to its power. A center, then, as I will use the term, is wherever the wealth, power, and knowledge of this overbearing economy have accumulated.

Modern technology, as it has developed from oceanic navigation to the World Wide Web, has been increasingly a centralizing force, enabling ever larger

accumulations of wealth, power, and knowledge in an ever smaller number of centers.

Since my concern here is with the need for communication—or, as I would prefer to say, conversation—between periphery and center, I must begin with the center’s characteristic ignorance of the periphery and center, I must begin with the center’s characteristic ignorance of the periphery. This, I suppose, must always have been so, even of the market towns of the world before the Renaissance. But in that older world, the cities and towns mostly (though with significant exceptions could take for granted that their tributary landscapes were populated by established rural communities that knew both how to make the land produce and how to take care of it.

in the Age of

mation It is still true that the center is supported by the periphery. All human economy is still land-based.

To the extent that we must eat and drink and be clothed, sheltered, and warmed, we live from the land. The idea that we have now progressed from a land-based economy to an economy based on information is a fantasy.

It is true that the center is supported by the center believe that the people of the periphery will always supply their needs from the land and will always keep the land productive: There will always be an abundance of food, fiber, timber, and fuel. This too is a fantasy. It is not known, but is simply taken for granted.

As its power of attraction increases, the center becomes more ignorant of the periphery. And under the pervasive influence of the center, the economic landscapes of the periphery have fewer and fewer inhabitants who know them well and know how to care properly for them. Many rural areas are now populated mostly by urban people.

In the New York Review of Books of March 24, 2005, Clifford Geertz wrote that tsunamis and other largescale disasters threaten “the conviction that perhaps most reconciles many of us…to our own mortality: that, though we ourselves may perish, the community into which we were born, and the sort of life it supports, will somehow live on”.

“development”. Since the end of World War II, the economic, technological, and social forces of industrialism have pretty thoroughly disintegrated the rural communities of the United States and, I believe, of other parts of the world also, inducing in them a “mobility” that has boiled over in the cities, disintegrating them as well.

But except for a few of the better established Amish communities, this conviction is an illusion; one cannot imagine how Mr. Geertz has held onto it. No matter even if “we” have stayed put geographically, if we are over thirty, or maybe even twenty, the community in which we live is by now radically unlike “the community in which we were born”.

In fact, there are now many people whose native communities have not only been radically changed but have been completely destroyed by some form of

Insofar as the center is utterly dependent upon the periphery, its ignorance of the periphery is not natural or necessary, but is merely dangerous. The danger is increased when this ignorance protects itself by contempt for the people who know. If the most intimate knowledge of the land from which you live belongs to people whom you consider to be the provincials or field niggers or hillbillies or hicks or rednecks, then you are not likely ever to learn very much.

Far from caring for our land and our rural people, as we would do if we understood our dependence on them, we have not, as a nation, given them so much as a serious thought for half a century. Our great politicians seem only dimly aware that an actual country lies out there beyond the places of power, wealth, and knowledge.

The ultimate official word on agriculture seems to have been spoken by Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, who told the farmers to “Get big or get out”.

A predominantly urban population that is contemptuous of the working people of the farms and forests cannot know enough about the country to exercise a proper responsibility for its good use.

And ignorance in the center promotes ignorance on the periphery. Knowledge that is not properly valued decreases in value, and so finally is lost. It is not possible to uproot virtually the whole agricultural population by economic adversity, replacing it with machines and chemicals, and still keep local knowledge of the land and land use at a high level of competence. We still know how to make the land produce, but only temporarily, for we are losing the knowledge of how to keep it productive. Wes Jackson has written and often said that when the ration of eyes to acres in agricultural landscapes becomes too wide, when the number of caretakers declines below a level that varies from place to place but is reckonable for everyplace, then good husbandry of the land becomes impossible.

The general complacency about such matters seems to rest on the assumption that science can serve as a secure connection between land and people, designing beneficent means and methods of land use and assuring the quality and purity of our food. But we cannot escape of ignore the evidence that this assumption is false.

There is, to begin with, too great a gap between the science and the practice of agriculture. This gap is inherent in the present organization of intellectual and academic life, and it formalizes the differences between knowing and doing, the laboratory or classroom and the world. It is generally true that agricultural scientists are consumers rather than producers of agricultural products. They eat with the same freedom from farmwork, weather, and the farm economy as other consumers, and perhaps with the same naïve confidence that a demand will dependably call forth supply.

Moreover, the official agriculture of science, government, and agribusiness has been concerned almost exclusively with the ability of the land to produce food and fiber, and ultimately salaries, grants, and profits.

It has correspondingly neglected its ecological and social responsibilities, and also, in many ways, its agricultural ones. It has ignored agriculture’s continuing obligations to be diverse, conservative of its means, and respectful of its natural supports.

The assumption that science can serve as an adequate connector between people and land, and thus can effectively replace the common knowledge and culture of local farm communities, by now has the status of an official program-though the aim of science, more often than not, is to connect capital with profit. The ascendancy of the expert involves a withdrawal or relinquishment of confidence in local intelligence-that is, in the knowledge, experience, and mental competence of ordinary people doing ordinary work.

The result, naturally, is that the competence of local intelligence has declined. We are losing the use of local minds at work on local problems.

The right way to deal with a problem, supposedly, is to summon an expert from government, industry, or a university, who will recommend the newest centrally-devised mechanical or chemical solution. Thus capital supposedly replaces intelligence as the basis of work, just as information supposedly replaces land as the basis of the economy.

This would be fine, of course, if the recommended solutions were in fact solving the problems. But too often they not only fail to solve the problems, but either make them worse or replace them with new problems.

These calamities of industrial agriculture define our need to take seriously Wes Jackson’s insistence that we need a farm population large, alert, and skilled enough, not just to make the land produce but to take the best possible care of it as well. At present we are so far from this goal that a number of depopulated rural communities in the prairie states are offering free land and other economic incentives to new settlers.

knowledgeable each must be in conversation with the other. They must know the truth of their interdependence; they must know what they owe to each other.

To speak of a need for knowledge, I know, is to put oneself in danger of being run over by the information economy and the communications industry hastening to the rescue with computers, data banks, PA systems, photocopiers, leaflets, and Power Point presentations. Despite my reputations as a Luddite, I don’t want to say that the information economy is useless, but I would like to say several things meant to burden it and slow it down, and (let us hope) improve it.

But we need to consider the possibility that even our remnant farm population possesses knowledge and experience that is indispensable in a rapidly urbanizing world. The center may need to pay attention to the periphery and accept its influence simply in order to survive. The first [testimonial] is from Robert B. Weeden, a biologist and writer who has done much of his work in Alaska: If science took on a regional/local focus, one result would be that, for the first time in three centuries, the gap between scientist and citizen would start to close…[W]hat we would see is that the conduct of critiqued experiment (science) and the close observation of unfolding life (common sense) would form a team. I watched this notion be born and begin its childhood in Alaska’s north. Scientists, newcomers from the south, were hired by federal agencies and oil corporations to find out something about the environment in which petroleum exploration and production would occur. Time was scarcer than money. Some of the scientists had enough casual conversation with Inuit and Yupik people to realize that if you wanted guides to the seasonal behavior of sea ice and its inhabitants, local people were far better sources than the thin and inadequate records of earlier scientists. The informal conversation grew into formal conferences, funding, and ongoing committees. To be honest, government and corporate motives were mixed, because, in addition to knowing something, native people also controlled access to places the oil folk wanted to explore. Nevertheless, two systems of knowledge did come together.

That the center at present is ignorantly dependent on the periphery does not suggest that the center is somehow inherently worthless. It is not. The periphery needs a center, just as a center needs a periphery.

One is unthinkable without the other. The center collects and stores things of value. It is a place of economic and cultural exchange. It is the right place for a stockyard or a university. The distinction I am working toward is that between an ignorant center and one that is properly knowledgeable, and also that between an ignorant periphery and one that is properly knowledgeable. The critical point is that to be properly

First, let us consider how we have degraded this word information. As you would expect, in-form-ation in its root meaning has to do with the idea of form: a pattern, structure, or ordering principle. To in-form is to form from within. Information, in this sense, refers to teaching and learning, to the formation of a person’s mind or character. But we seem to be using the word now almost exclusively to refer to a random accumulation of facts, all having the one common characteristic of availability; they can, as we are too likely to say, be “accessed”.

Sometimes they are available at seller’s price. At whatever cost this information is made available to its potential users, it arrives unformed and unexperienced.

There is nothing deader or of more questionable value than facts in isolation.

And this exposes the problem of an information economy. The problem is in determining the value of the commodity, information being much harder to evaluate than real goods such as food, clothing, and shelter. The value of information is in its usefulness in manipulating, for better or worse, the natural world. If the result is “for better,” then the information can be accounted an asset, if “for worse,” then it must be booked as a liability, of less than no value. But until the information is shaped into knowledge in some particular mind and applied with or without harm to an actual place, we will not know whether or not is an asset or how valuable an asset it is.

This warehousing of accessible information is obviously an activity of the center.

Information of this sort is one of the commodities that the center collects and dispenses to the periphery. The center, as we now say, “communicates” with the periphery, the market or the factory or the university communicates with the countryside, by means of this information.

Sometimes the information is sent out

encoded in various kinds of technology, sometimes in printed instructions or reports, sometimes in radio or television broadcasts. And this communication is a connection between the center and the periphery.

But let us consider, secondly, that this is only half a connection. It is a oneway communication between an active sender and a passive receiver. This is why I said earlier that I prefer conversation to communication. Communication, as we have learned from our experience with the media, goes one way, from the center outward to the periphery.

But a conversation goes two ways; in a conversation the communication goes back and forth. A conversation, unlike a “communication”, cannot be prepared ahead of time, and it is changed as it goes along by what is said. Nobody beginning a conversation can know how it will end. And there is always the possibility that a conversation, by bringing its participants under one another’s influence, will change them, possibly for the better. (Conversation, as I understand the term, refers to talk between or among people for their mutual edification. This excludes talk shows or call-in programs, which are commodities for consumption by a nonparticipating audience.)

Once we have proposed a conversation between center and periphery, we see immediately that what the periphery has to say to the center is critically different from what the center has to say, or at

least from what it presently is saying, to the periphery.

The information that is accumulated at the center-at the corporate or academic or governmental end of the information economy-and then dispersed to the periphery tends necessarily toward the abstract or universal, toward general applicability. When the periphery accepts these things uncritically adopting the ideas and the language of the center, then it has begun to belong to the center, and usually at a considerable long-term cost to itself. The immediate cost is the loss of knowledge and language specific to localities.

But the question we are trying to raise here is How can the best work be done?

Or: How can we give the best possible care to our highly variable economic landscapes, in which no two woodlands, no two farms, and no two fields are exactly alike? If we are ever to get the right answers to this question, then the people of the periphery will have to cultivate and cherish knowledge of their places and communities, which are always to some extent unique. This

will be placed knowledge; out of place, it is little better than ignorance; and it is learnable only at home. To speak of it will require a placed knowledge; out of place, it is little better than ignorance; and it is learnable only at home. To speak of it will require a placed language, made in reference to local names, conditions, and needs. Moreover, the people of the center need to know that this local knowledge is a necessary knowledge of their world. They need to hear the local languages with understanding and respect-no more talk about “hicks” and “provincials” and “rednecks”. A refined, discriminating knowledge of localities by the local people is indispensable if we want the most sensitive application of intelligence to local problems, if we want the best work to be done, if we want the world to last. If we give up the old orientation of agriculture to the nature of individuals technology, and the global economy, then the result is uniformity, oversimplification, overspecialization, and (inevitably) destruction.

To use handiest practical example, I am talking about the need for a two-way communication, a conversation, between

“Nobody beginning a conversation can know how it will end.”

a land grant university and the region for and to which it is responsible. The idea of the extension service should be applied to the whole institution. Not just the agricultural extension agents, but also the graduate teachers, doctors, lawyers, and other community servants should be involved. They should be carrying news from the university out into its region, of course. But this would be extension in two directions: They would also be carrying back into the university news of what is happening that works well, what is succeeding according to the best standards, what works locally. And they should be carrying back criticism also: what is not working, what the university is not doing that it should do, what it is doing that it should do better.

Communication is not necessarily cooperative. “Get big or get out” is a communication, and hardly expectant of a reply. But conversation is necessarily cooperative, and it can carry us, far beyond the principle of competition, to an understanding of common interest.

By conversation a university or a city and its region could define themselves as one community rather than an assortment of competing interests. Center and periphery, city and country, consumers and producers do not have to define themselves as economic adversaries.

They can begin to be a community simply by asking: What can we do for each other? What do you need that we can supply you with or do for you? What do you need to know that we can tell you?

Once the conversation has started, it will quickly become obvious, I think, that there must be a common, agreed-upon standard of judgment; and I think this will have to be health: the health of ecosystems and of human communities.

There will have to be also a common idea, or hope, of economic justice.

The operative principles here would be production controls, to prevent surpluses from being used as a weapon against producers; and fairness, granting to small producers and tradespeople the same marketing advantages as to large ones. And so good-bye to volume discounts. There is some knowledge that cannot be communicated by communication technology, the accumulation of taperecorded “oral histories” not withstanding. For what may be the most essential knowledge, how to work well in one’s place, language simply is not an adequate vehicle. To return again to land use as an example, farming itself, like life itself, is different from information or knowledge or anything else that can be verbally communicated. It is not just the local application of science; it is also the local practice of a local art and the living of a local life.

There is in addition for us humans, always, the unknown, things perhaps that we need to know that we do not know and are never going to know.

There is mystery. Obvious as it is, we easily forget that beyond our sciences and our arts, beyond our technology and

our language, is the irreducible reality of our precious world that somehow, so far, has withstood our demands and accommodated our life, and of which we will always be dangerously ignorant.

Our great modern powers of science, technology, and industry are always offering themselves to us with the suggestion that we know enough to use them well, that we are intelligent enough to act without limit in our own behalf. But the evidence is now rapidly mounting against us. By living as we do, in our ignorance and our pride, we are diminishing our world and the possibility of life.

This is a plea for humility.

“

The past is our definit

We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

tion

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IN THIS

WORLD The hill pasture, an open place among the trees, tilts into the valley. The clovers and tall grasses are in bloom. Along the foot of the hill dark floodwater moves down the river.

The sun sets. Ahead of nightfall the birds sing.

I have climbed up to water the horses and now sit and rest, high on the hillside, letting the day gather and pass. Below me cattle graze out across the wide fields of the bottomlands, slow and preoccupied as stars. In this world men are making plans, wearing themselves, out, spending their lives, in order to kill each other.

THE MORN NEWS

E NING’S S To moralize the state, they drag out a man, and bind his hands, and darken his eyes with a black rag to be free of the light in them, and tie him to a post, and kill him.

And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

To kill in hot savagery like a beast is understandable. It is forgivable and curable.

But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath, that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

The serpent is gentle, compared to man.

It is man, the inventor of cold violence, death as waste, who has made himself lonely among the creatures, and set himself aside,

so that he cannot work in the sun with hope, or sit at peace in the shade of any tree.

The morning’s news drives sleep out of the head at night. Uselessness and horror hold the eyes open to the dark. Weary, we lie awake in the agony of the old giving birth to the new without assurance that the new will be better.

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god’s, they are so open to the world.

I look at my sloping fields now turning green with the young grass of April. What must I do to go free? I think I must put on a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die rather than enter into the design of man’s hate.

I will purge my mind of the airy claims of church and state. I will serve the earth and not pretend my life could better serve.

Another morning comes with its strange cure.

The earth is news. Though the river floods and the spring is cold, my heart goes on, faithful to a mystery in a cloud, and the summer’s garden continues its descent through me, toward the ground.

MEDITA

IN THE SPRING

ATION

G RAIN

In the April rain I climbed up to drink of the live water leaping off the hill, white over the rocks. Where the mossy root of a sycamore cups the flow, I drank and saw the branches feathered with green.

The thickets, I said, sendup their praise at dawn. Was that what I meant-I meant my words to have the heft and grace, the flight and weight of the very hill, its life rising or was it some old exultation that abides with me? We’ll not soon escape the faith of our fathers-no more than crazy old Mrs. Gaines, whom my grandmother remembers standing balanced eighty years ago atop a fence in Port Royal, Kentucky, singing: “One Lord, one Faith, and one Cornbread.” They had a cage built for her in a room, “nearly as big as the room, not cramped up,” and when she grew wild they kept her there. But mostly she went free in the town, and they allowed the children to go for walks with her. She strayed once beyond where they thought she went, was lost to them, “and they had an awful time finding her.” For her, to be free was only to be lost. What is it about her that draws me on, so that my mind becomes a child to follow after her? An old woman when my grandmother was a girl, she must have seen the virgin forest standing here, the amplitude of our beginning, of which no speech remains. Out of the town’s lost history, buried in minds long buried, she has come, brought back by a memory near death. I see her in her dusky clothes, hair uncombed, the children into the turning and changing circle of all lovers. On this height our labor changes into flight.

A

Jonqu Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up and light the lamp and renew the fires.

for

She was sick. At first it was a consolation to her to have the whole day to herself to be sick in.

She ached. She was overpoweringly tired.

She had rarely been sick and never since she married. And now she did something else that was unlike her: she allowed herself to feel sorry for herself. She was sick and alone. And perhaps the sorrow that she felt for herself was not altogether unjustified.

She and Elton had married a year and a half earlier, when she was seventeen and he eighteen. She had never seen anybody like him. 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. And he could do things. It was wonderful what he could accomplish with those enormous hands of his. She could have put her hand into his and walked right off the edge of the world. Which, in a way, is what she did.

She had grown up in a substantial house on a good upland farm. Her family was not wealthy, but it was an old family, proud of itself, always conscious of its position and of its responsibility to be itself. She had known from childhood that she would be sent to college. Almost from childhood she had understood that she was destined to be married to a solid professional man, a doctor perhaps, or (and this her mother particularly favored) perhaps a minister.

And so when she married Elton she did so without telling her family. She already knew their judgment of Elton: “He’s nothing.” She and Elton simply drove down to Hargrave one late October night, awakened a preacher, and got married, hoping that their marriage would be accepted as an accomplished fact. They were wrong. It was not

acceptable, and it was never going to be.

She no longer belonged in that house, her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that family. To them it would be as if she had never lived.

It was a different world, a new world to her, that she came into then—a world of poverty and community. They were in a neighborhood of six households, counting their own, all within half a mile of one another. Besides themselves there were Braymer and Josie Hardy and their children; Tom Hardy and his wife, also named Josie; Walter and Thelma Cotman and their daughter, Irene; Jonah and Daisy Hample and their children; and Uncle Isham and Aunt Frances Quail, who were Thelma Cotman’s and Daisy Hample’s parents. The two Josies, to save confusion, were called Josie Braymer and Josie Tom. Josie Tom was Walter Cotman’s sister. In the world that Mary Penn had given up, a place of far larger and richer farms, work was sometimes exchanged, but the families were conscious of themselves in a way that set them apart from one another.

uil

Mary Penn Here, in this new world, neighbors were always working together. “Many hands make light work,” Uncle Isham Quail loved to say, though his own old hands were no longer able to work much.

Some work only the men did together, like haying and harvesting the corn.

Some work only the women did together: sewing or quilting or wallpapering or housecleaning; and whenever the men were together working, the women would be together cooking. Some work the men and women did together: harvesting tobacco or killing hogs or any other job that needed many hands. It was an old community. They all had worked together a long time. They all knew what each one was good at.

When they worked together, not much needed to be explained. When they went down to the little weatherboarded church at Goforth on Sunday morning, they were glad to see one another and had much to say, though they had seen each other almost daily during the week.

This neighborhood opened to Mary and Elton and took them in with a warmth that answered her parents’ rejection.

The men, without asking or being asked, included Elton in whatever they were doing. They told him when and where they needed him. They came to him when he needed them. He was an apt and able hand, and they were glad to have his help.

He learned from them all but liked best to work with Walter Cotman, who was a fine farmer. He and Walter were, up to a point, two of a kind; both were impatient of disorder—”I can’t stand a damned mess,” said Walter, and he made none—and both loved the employment of their minds in their work. Though he was a quiet man and gave neither instruction nor advice, Walter was Elton’s teacher, and Elton was consciously his student.

Mary, who had more to learn than Elton, became a daughter to every woman in the community. She came knowing little, barely enough to begin, and they taught her much. Thelma, Daisy, and the two Josies taught her their ways of cooking, cleaning, and sewing; they taught her to

can, pickle, and preserve; they taught her to do the women’s jobs in the hog killing. They took her on their expeditions to one another’s houses to cook harvest meals or to houseclean or to gather corn from the fields and can it. One day they all walked down to Goforth to do some wallpapering for Josie Tom’s mother.

They papered two rooms, had a good time, and Josie Tom’s mother fixed them a dinner of fried chicken, creamed new potatoes and peas, hot biscuits, and cherry cobbler.

Josie Tom was a plump, pretty, happy woman, childless but the mother of any child in reach. Mary Penn loved her the best, perhaps, but she loved them all.

They were only in their late thirties or early forties, but to Mary they seemed to belong to the ageless, eternal generation of mothers, unimaginably older and more experienced than herself. She called them Miss Josie, Miss Daisy, and Miss Thelma. They warmed and sheltered her. Sometimes she could just have tossed herself at them like a little girl to be hugged.

They were capable, unasking, generous, humorous women, and sometimes, among themselves, they were raucous and free, unlike the other women she had known. On their way home from picking blackberries one afternoon, they had to get through a new barbed wire fence. Josie Tom held two wires apart while the other four gathered their skirts, leaned down, and straddled through. Josie Tom handed their filled buckets over. And then Josie Braymer held the wires apart, and Josie Tom, stooping through, got the back of her dress hung on the top wire.

“I knew it!” she said, and she began to laugh. They all laughed, and nobody laughed more than Josie Tom, who was standing spraddled and stooped, helpless to move without tearing her dress.

“Josie Braymer,” she said, “are you going to just stand there, or are you going to unhook me from this shitten fence?”

And there on the ridgetop in the low sunlight they danced the dance of women laughing, bending and straightening, raising and lowering their hands, swaying and stepping with their heads back.

Only day before yesterday it had been spring-warm, sunny, and still. 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.

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. The stove’s heat drove the cold out of her clothes, and gradually her shivering stopped.

Often the world afforded them something to laugh about.

When they got snowed in that winter, they would drive the old car down the 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 improved, 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 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.

Now she thought of herself as belonging there, not just because of her marriage to Elton but also because of the economy that the 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 Quailgone too.

“Often, the worl something to lau

ld afforded them ugh about.”

At the end of the summer, when she and Elton were beginning their first tobacco harvest in the neighborhood, Tom Hardy said to Elton, “Now, Josie Braymer can outcut us all, Elton. If she gets ahead of you, just don’t pay it any mind.”

“Tom,” Elton said, “I’m going to leave here now and go to the other end of this row. If Josie Braymer’s there when I get there, I’m going home.”

When he got there Josie Braymer was not there, and neither was any of the men. It was not that he did not want to be bested by a woman; he did not want to be bested by anybody. One thing Mary would never have to do was wonder which way he was. 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.

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 inn his love as in a spacious house. Walter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half” In spite of his sulks and silences, she would not go so far as “better.” That she was his half, she had no doubt at all. When had there ever been such a yearning of halves toward each other, such a longing, even in quarrels, to be whole?

And sometimes they would be whole. Their wholeness came upon them as a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark.

But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself a part without counterpart, a mere fragment of something unknown, dark and broken off. The fire had burned low in the stove. Though she still wore her coat, she was chilled again and shaking. For a long time, perhaps, she had been thinking of nothing, and now misery alerted her again to the room. The wind ranted and sucked at the house’s comers. She could hear its billows and shocks, as if somebody off in the distance were shaking a great rug. She felt, not a draft, but the whole atmosphere of the room moving coldly against her. She went into the other room, but the fire there also needed building up.

She could not bring herself to do it. She was shaking, she ached, she could think only of lying down. Standing near the stove, she undressed, put on her nightgown again, and went to bed.

She lay chattering and shivering while the bedclothes warmed around her. It seemed to her that a time might come when sickness would be a great blessing, for she truly did not care if she died. She thought of Elton, caught up in the day’s wind, who could not even look at her and see that she was sick. If she had not been too miserable, she would have cried. But then her thoughts began to slip away, like dishes sliding along a table pitched as steeply as a roof.

She went to sleep.

When she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heating stove was muttering and steaming. Though the wind was still blowing hard, the room was full of sunlight. The lamp on the narrow mantelshelf behind the stove was filled and clean, its chimney gleaming, and so was the one on the stand by the bed. Josie Tom was sitting in the rocker by the window, sunlight flowing in on the unfinished long embroidery she had draped over her lap. She was bowed over her work, filling in with her needle and a length of yellow thread the bright corolla of a jonquil—or “Easter lily,” as she would have called it. She was humming the tune of an old hymn, something she often did while she was working, apparently without awareness that she was doing it. Her voice was resonant, low, and quiet, barely audible, as if it were coming out of the air and she, too, were merely listening to it. The yellow flower was nearly complete.

And so Mary knew all the story of her day. Elton, going by Josie Tom’s in the half-light, had stopped and called.

She could hear his voice, raised to carry through the wind: “Mrs. Hardy, Mary’s sick, and I have to go over to Walter’s to plow.”

So he had known. He had thought of her. He had told Josie Tom. Feeling herself looked at, Josie Tom raised her head and smiled.

“Well, are you awake? Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said. And she slept again.

In the great circle, dancing in and out of time, you move now toward your partners, answering the music suddenly audible to you that only carried you before and will carry you again.

When you meet the destined ones now dancing toward you, we will be in line behind you, out of your awareness for the time, we whom you know, others we remember whom you do not remember, others forgotten by us all.

When you meet, and hold love in your arms, regardless of all, the unknown will dance away from you Toward the horizon of light.

Our names will flutter on these hills like little fires.

OUR Children, COMING OF AGE

SOURCES Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York and San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982.

New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005

This book was created by Francesca Maida as her Typography 2 final project, during her junior Fall 2015 semester at Washington University in St. Louis. She aimed to express the acceptance or rejection of an individual’s place in their surrounding environment . She was very influenced by the collages of artist Sebastian Duran while creating her own images. The text was set in various weights of Proxima Nova and Courier Prime.