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

on slappity-slap, knowing he couldn’t help but hear. I had to keep it up quite a while before he said anything.
    Finally he said, “What’s your hurry?”
    â€œWell, you said it’s time we were getting done with this,” I said, no matter that we clearly were getting done with it. “I’m just taking your word for it, that’s all.”
    He didn’t answer. But I knew he was getting mad. It would make him mad when you were being unserious about work. I went on, slappity-slap, loading my brush with paint and making it pop against the roof. Jarrat was commenting by not saying anything. I was cooking him on a slow fire, and I ought to’ve had my ass kicked, for the poor fellow all his life had a harder time of it than I did, but being a man of weak character I couldn’t stop.
    I said, “And I got places to go and things to do.”
    He went ahead, serious about his work, and didn’t say anything for another while. And then he said, “Well, don’t slobber it on.”
    I straightened up and unseriously rolled a cigarette and stuck it in the corner of my mouth and lit it and picked up my bucket and brush. I hadn’t hardly more than just started painting again when we heard this low buzz way off in the sky, and it got louder. We looked where the sound was coming from, and directly out of the heat haze and the shimmer this airplane just appeared.
    Back then an airplane was a rare sight, and this one was a four-winger flying lower than we’d ever seen one. The idea that some body was in that thing flying through the sky seemed to come somewhere between prime idiocy and a miracle. It passed right over the top of us.
    And then several events took place so fast they almost happened at the same time. While I was looking so straight up that my hat started to fall off, I stepped backwards to see better and threw my whole weight right onto the wet paint. I grabbed for my hat with my right hand that had the loaded brush in it and only painted the side of my face, the hat was gone. And so was I, of course. I dropped bucket and brush both to try for a handhold in the thin air, and didn’t find one.
    Half a gallon of spilled paint makes a tin roof uncommonly slick. I hadn’t had time to fall over, so I was going down that roof standing up, like a boy sliding on ice, and I was saying very clearly in my mind, “Well, this is the end of you, old bud.” I shot off the roof right into the top of that old cedar tree, and that’s how come I’m here to tell about it. I never could make my mind up whether it was Providence or luck, so I split the middle and thanked Providence for my luck.
    A tree like that, you know, grows its top branches upwards and its lower ones outwards. As I was flying in among them, the top branches raked some skin off here and there, and I reckon that slowed me down. When I came to the outreaching lower branches, they just bent and tumbled me from one to the next, sort of gently, maybe gracefully, until the bottom one dropped me without too much of a thump onto the ground. And there I sat, spraddle-legged in the shade, cooler than I’d been since dinner.
    When I got reorganized enough to look up at where I’d come from, there was Jarrat holding to his rope and looking over the eave of the roofto see what was left of me. We looked back and forth at each other what seemed a long time, and it was awfully quiet.
    After a while he said, “Well, are you practicing up for something, or was that it?”
    It came to me I was alive. That cigarette was still stuck in the corner of my mouth, still lit. I didn’t answer. I sat there with half my face painted blue and finished my smoke. Jarrat watched me until I reckon he was satisfied, and then he got back to being himself.
    â€œLong as you’re on the ground, how ’bout getting us a fresh jug of water?”

A Burden (1882, 1907, 1941)
    â€œMe and Teddy Roosyvelt, we