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

girlhood
dreams. She must have seen him simply as she wanted to see him: a young
man handsome as a prince, who would make her the envy of other girls.
She must have imagined herself and him as "a beautiful couple." To
Momma-pie - assuming that my father's theory of artful entrapment
was correct-he must have seemed "an excellent prospect," good raw
material in need of polish. If in fact they captured him, then they captured a bull in a henhouse. He was, as undoubtedly he already knew or
soon found out, the very reality that their not-altogether-pretended feminine delicacy was least disposed to recognize. And now they were
obliged to try to contain him in an enclosure prepared for another kind
of creature. He was, whatever else he was, a man of his own time and
place. He honored to some extent the conventions of his capture; he was
capable of affection, sympathy, and regret. Though his confinement did
not exist except when he submitted to it, sometimes he submitted to it.
But he could not be held. It was not so much that he resisted or defied or
rebelled against his bondage; he simply overflowed it. When he filled to
his own fullness, he overflowed his confines as a rising river overflows
its banks, making nothing of the boundaries and barriers that stand in
its way.
    The three of them made their daily lives, formed and followed their
routines, made things ordinary and bearable for themselves. Their
strange convergence was not a perpetual crisis. But it was nonetheless
hopeless. They were two almost forceless women entangled past untangling with an almost ungentled man. He of course was as spoiled in his
way as they were in theirs. They had been spoiled by generations of men
who had indulged and promoted their helplessness; he had been spoiled
by women who had allowed him to charm them into acceptance of his
inborn unstoppability. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie had spoiled him
themselves, as I think all the women in his life had done. They were under his spell, as much caught by him as he by them. They could not contain
him, but they could not expel him either.

    The best friend he had, I am certain, was my father, who loved him
completely. But my father, purposeful and tireless, sober and passionate,
in love with his family and his work, true to his obligations, could not
have been Uncle Andrew's crony. They could be friends within the terms
of brotherhood and partnership, but partly perhaps because he was
Uncle Andrew's brother, my father was not wild; the whole budget of
Catlett wildness in that generation had been allotted to Uncle Andrew.
For cronies, Uncle Andrew had Buster Simms and Yeager Stump.
    In his look and laugh and way of talking, Buster Simms gleefully
acknowledged the world's lewdness. He was a freckled, smallish, quickeyed man whose conversation tended to be all in tones of joking, from
aggressive to kind. He called Uncle Andrew "Duke." Yeager Stump was
a tall, good-looking man of somewhat the same style as Uncle Andrew.
Of the three, he was the quietest. You could see in the wrinkly corners
of his eyes that he was always waiting to be amused, and was being
amused while he waited. Of the three, he was the only one who lived to
be old.
    All three felt themselves too straitly confined in marriage, and they
escaped into each other's company. Or rather, each other's company was
their freedom that, spent or hung over, they allowed themselves to be
recaptured out of, as Samson allowed himself to be bound with seven
green withes that were never dried.
    "We did everything we thought of," Yeager Stump would say later.
"Our only limit was our imagination."
    They called each other "Cud'n Andrew" and "Cud'n Bustah" and
"Cud'n Yeagah"- for ordinary use abbreviated to "Cuz"- in endless parody of the female cousinship of Hargrave.
    When they met in their daily comings and goings, they would greet
one another with a broad show of camaraderie and affection:
    "Hello, Cuz!"
    "Hello,