A Jonquil for Mary PennAnd Other Selected Works

By Wendell Berry

A Jonquil for Mary PennAnd Other Selected Works

By Wendell Berry

Port WilliamM a p o f

Port William

Mary Penn was sick, though she said nothing about it when she heard Elton get up

and light the lamp and renew the fires. He dressed and went out with the lantern

to milk and feed and harness the team. It was early March, and she could hear the

wind blowing, rattling things. She threw the covers off and sat up on the side of

the bed, feeling as she did how easy it would be to let her head lean down again

onto her knees. But she got up, put on her dress and sweater, and went to the

kitchen.

Nor did she mention it when Elton came back in, bringing the milk, with the smell

of the barn cold in his clothes.

“How’re you this morning?” he asked her, giving her a pat as she strained the milk.

And she said, not looking at him, for she did not want him to know how she felt,

“Just fine.”

He ate hungrily the eggs, sausage, and biscuits that she set in front of him, twice

emptying the glass that he replenished from a large pitcher of milk. She loved to

watch him eat-there was something curiously delicate in the way he used his large

hands-but this morning she busied herself about the kitchen, not looking at him,

for she knew he was watching her. She had not even set a place for herself.

“You’re not hungry?” he asked.

“Not very. I’ll eat something after while.”

A Jonqu i l fo r

Mary Penn

1

hough he might loiter a moment over his coffee, the day, she knew,

had already possessed him; its momentum was on him. When

he rose from bed in the morning, he stepped into the day’s work,

impelled into it by the tension, never apart from him, between what he wanted

to do and what he could do. The little hillside place that they had rented from

his mother afforded him no proper scope for his ability and desire. They always

needed money, but, day by day, they were getting by. Though the times were hard,

they were not going to be in want. But she knew his need to surround her with a

margin of pleasure and ease. This was his need, not hers; still, when he was not

working at home, he would be working, or looking for work, for pay.

He stood and pushed in his chair. She came to be hugged as she knew he wanted

her to.

“It’s mean out,” he said. “Stay in today. Take some care of yourself.”

“All right,” she said.

He shut the door. And now the kitchen was a cell of still lamplight under the long

wind that passed without inflection over the ridges.

She cleared the table. She washed the few dishes he had dirtied and put them away.

The kitchen contained the table and four chairs, and the small dish cabinet that

T

2

they had bought, and the large iron cookstove that looked more permanent than

the house. The stove, along with the bed and a few other sticks of furniture, had

been there when they came.

She heard Elton go by with the team, heading out the lane. The daylight would be

coming now, though the windowpanes still reflected the lamplight. She took the

broom from its corner by the back door and swept and tidied up the room. They

had been able to do nothing to improve the house, which had never been a good

one and had seen hard use. The wallpaper, and probably the plaster behind, had

cracked in places. The finish had worn off the linoleum rugs near the doorways

and around the stoves. But she kept the house clean. She had made curtains. The

curtains in the kitchen were of the same blue and-white checkered gingham as the

tablecloth. The bed stands were orange crates for which she had made skirts of the

same cloth. Though the house was poor and hard to keep, she had made it neat and

homey. It was her first house, and usually it made her happy.

She was sick.B u t n o t n o w .

3

t 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 in his love as in a spacious house. Wal-

ter Cotman always spoke of Mary as Elton’s “better half ”. That she was his half,

she had no doubt at all. He needed her. At times she knew with a joyous ache that

she completed him, just as she knew with the same joy that she needed him and he

completed her.

to be completed by such another half? 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.

AHow beaut i f u l a t h in g i t wa s , sh e t hought ,

to be a half,

4

But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself a part without coun-

terpart, 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. 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 t o sl e ep .

5

hen she woke, the room was warm. A teakettle on the heat-

ing 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 com-

ing 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.

W

6

7

“Wel l , a re you awak e?

Are you a l l r i gh t?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said.

8

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” Mary said.

9

And she slept again.

9

and on e l i v e s a t t h e expen se of l i f e .

I have plowed in the seeds

of winter grains and of various legumes,

their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.

I have stirred into the ground the offal

and the decay of the growth of past seasons

Enriching the Earth

t o g row and d i e . To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass

and made its yield increase.

All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling

into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,

not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness

and so mended th e ea r th

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and on e l i v e s a t t h e expen se of l i f e .

Enriching the Earth

11

and so mended th e ea r th

After death, willing or not, the body serves,

entering the earth. And so what was heaviest

and most mute is at last raised up into song.

and a delight to the air, and my days

do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,

for when the will fails so do the hands

11

12

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, f lowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy with seed,

spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

Sowing

13

In the stilled place that once was a road going down

from the town to the river, and where the lives of marriages grew

a house, cistern and barn, f lowers, the tilted stone of borders,

and the deeds of their lives ran to neglect, and honeysuckle

and then the fire overgrew it all, I walk heavy with seed,

spreading on the cleared hill the beginnings

of green, clover and grass to be pasture. Between

history’s death upon the place and the trees that would have come

I claim, and act, and am mingled in the fate of the world.

Our Children, Coming of Age

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 f lutter

on these hills like little fires.

14

His memories lived in the place

like fingers locked in the rock ledges

like roots. When he died

and his influence entered the air

I said, Let my mind be the earth

of his thought, let his kindness

go ahead of me. Though I do not escape

the history barbed in my flesh,

certain wise movements ofhis hands,

the turns of his speech

keep with me. His hope of peace

keeps with me in harsh days,

the shell of his breath dimming away

three summers in the earth.

A Praise

15

Within the circles of our lives

we dance the circles of the years,

the circles of the seasons

within the circles of the years,

the cycles of the moon

within the circles of the seasons,

the circles of our reasons

within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,

changed, changing. Hands

join, unjoin in love and fear,

grief and joy. The circles turn,

each giving into each, into all.

Song (4)

into the darker circles of return.

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17

Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.

In the hold of hands and eyes

we turn in pairs, that joining

joining each to all again.

And then we turn aside, alone,

out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.

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18

Newspaper editorials deplore such human-caused degradations of the oceans as

the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone,” and reporters describe practices like “mountain

removal” mining in eastern Kentucky. Some day we may finally understand the

connections.

The health of the oceans depends on the health of rivers; the health of rivers

depends on the health of small streams; the health of small streams depends on

the health of their watersheds. The health of the water is exactly the same as the

health of the land;

Contempt for Small Places

t h e h ea l th of small places i s exact ly th e same a s th e h ea l th of large places.

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Contempt for Small Places

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As we know, disease is hard to confine. Because natural law is in force everywhere,

infections move.

t h e h ea l th of small places i s exact ly th e same a s th e h ea l th of large places.

19

We cannot immunize the continents and the oceans against our con- tempt for

small places and small streams. Small destructions add up, and finally they are

understood collectively as large destructions. Excessive nutrient runoff from

farms and animal factories in the Mississippi water- shed has caused, in the Gulf

of Mexico, a hypoxic or “dead zone” of five or six thousand square miles. In forty-

odd years, strip mining in the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in mountain

removal, has gone far toward the destruction of a whole region, with untold

damage to the region’s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.

There is not a more exemplary history of our contempt for small places than that

of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many absentee corporate

shareholders and left the region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry

representatives are now defending mountain removal-and its attendant damage

to forests, streams, wells, dwellings, roads, and community life by saying that in

“10, 15, 20 years” the land will be restored, and that such mining has “created the

[level] land” needed for further industrial development.

But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and

you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the water- shed. These things

are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or in ten or twenty hundred years.

As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has

already far exceeded any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.

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The contradictions in the state’s effort “to balance the competing interests”

were stated as follows by Ewell Balltrip, director of the Kentucky Appalachian

Commission: “If you don’t have mining, you don’t have an economy, and if you

don’t have an economy you don’t have a way for the people to live. But if you don’t

have environmental quality, you won’t create the kind of place where people want

to live.”

And i f t h e cl ea rly fo re se eabl e re s u l t

i s a re g i on of f l a t i ndu s t r i a l s i t e sYes. whe re nobody wants to live,

we n e ed a

better economy.

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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 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”. 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 premise, implicit, often

explicit, in almost all of his work, is that we must have a particular place, must

identify with it, must learn from it, must love it, must care for it. And only by

living in this place long enough, and by attending to the knowledge of those who

have lived there before us, will we fully realize the consequences of our presence

there: “We may deeply affect a place we own for good or ill,” he writes “but our

lives are nevertheless included in its life; it will survive us, bearing the results”

Wendell Berry

23

FICTION

Fidelity

Hannah Coulter

Jayber Crow

The Memory of Old Jack

Nathan Coulter

A Place on Earth

Remembering

That Distant Land

Watch with Me

The Wild Birds

A World Lost

POETRY

The Broken Ground

Clearing

Collected Poems: 1951-1982

The Country of Marriage

Entries

Farming: A Hand Book

Findings

Given

Openings

A Part

Sabbaths

Sayings and Doings

The Selected Poems of Wendell

Berry (I998)

A Timbered Choir

The Wheel

ESSAYS

Another Turn of the Crank

The Art of the Commonplace

Citizenship Papers

A Continuous Harmony

The Gift of Good Land

Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

The Hidden Wound

Home Economics

Life Is a Miracle

The Long-Legged House

Recollected Essays: 1965-1980

Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Com-

munity

Standing by Words

The Unforeseen Wilderness

The Unsettling of America

What Are People For?

© 2011 Lisa Ito

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Lisa Ito is a Communication Design

student at the Sam Fox School of

Design & Visual Arts at Washington

University in St. Louis. For

information please contact Lisa Ito at

LisaI@wustl.edu or call at

201-660-2640.

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