Remembering by Wendell Berry Read Free Book Online

who or where they were, their dear homeland drawn up into the Future of the American Food System to be seen no more, forever destroyed by schemes, by numbers, by deadly
means, all its springs poisoned. For years Andy has been moved by the possibility of acting in opposition to this, but he does not feel it now. It has gone away. He feels himself strangely fixed, cut off, unable to want either to stand or to move.
    And yet there is a memory flickering in the stump of his arm, and it is not that of the clasp of the hooks’ fastenings. It is the imprint of the thumb and fingers of a man’s hand, hard, forthright, and friendly.
    When his first crop of alfalfa was ready to harvest in mid May, they came to help him — Nathan and Danny and Jack, and Martin and Arthur Rowanberry. Or, rather, they came and harvested his hay, he helping them, and doing it poorly enough in his own opinion, with embarrassment, half resenting their charitable presumption, embarrassing them by his self-apology.
    Nathan, who ran the crew — because Andy was useless to do it, and somebody had to do it — mainly ignored him, except to give him orders in the form of polite questions: “Don’t you think it’ll do to go up this afternoon?” “What about you running the rake?”
    When they were finished, Andy, speaking as he knew out of the worst of his character, said, “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”
    And speaking out of the best of his, Nathan said, “Help us. ” So saying, he looked straight at Andy, grinned, took hold of his right forearm, and gave just a little tug.

    That was in another world. That memory in the flesh of his arm could not be stranger if it were some spirit’s parting touch that he had borne with him into the womb.
    The incident gave him no ease. It placed an expectation on him that he could not refuse and did not want. He did go to help them, but only as a nuisance, he felt, to them and to himself. He had little belief that they needed him or that he could help them. And, faced with his uncertainty, they seemed not to know what to ask of him. Except, that is, for Nathan. Nathan ignored him as he was, and treated him as if he were a stranger who required an extraordinary nicety of manners, speaking to him almost exclusively in polite questions. How would he feel about doing this? Would he mind doing that?

    And all of this was characteristic of Nathan, who had known a war that was his country’s and his time’s, and who had made a peace that was his own. He entirely lacked the strenuous dissatisfactions with self and circumstance and other people that had been so much a part of the bond between Andy and Elton. He was Andy’s third cousin on Andy’s father’s side, and he was, in a fashion, the son-in-law of Andy’s mother’s father, Mat Feltner. He was a good, quiet man, as if he were Mat’s blood son as well as the husband of his onetime daughter-in-law. There was an accuracy of generosity in Nathan that Andy wondered at, and no nonsense. He said little and spoke well. And Andy began to live in a kind of fear of him. That clamp of Nathan’s hand, by which Nathan had meant to include him, excluded him. Because he could not answer it, it lived upon his flesh like a burn, the brand of his exile.
    As though Nathan is standing beside him now in the little dark room, Andy turns away. He begins to dress, avoiding the mirror now, fearfully, as if, looking in, he might see himself with the head of a toad. He does not think, but only feels. He does not think of the origin of the pain he feels, or of the anger hollow and dry in his heart.
    And now, dressing, he hurries to get out. He has begun to hear again the night noises of the city. He has known the city since his first travels, nearly twenty years ago, and he feels it around him now, standing stepped and graceful on its heights, and around it the