Wendell Berry is a gentleman of  “a certain age” and his age is a significant element of his creative genius. His maturation, moral acuity, and experiences are all factors that reach denouement in his stories, in the act of  “remembering.” It is his memory that has given us Mat Feltner and Jayber Crow and “Old” Jack Beechum. Surely he knew these people, at least bits and pieces of them, and through his creativity, his genius, he crafted a community of humane human beings -- “the Port William membership” -- who were born, married, raised their families, and died along the verdant ridges and “bottoms” that spread southward from “the river.” 

They are country people much given to independence and interdependence. Their hands are calloused and their boots are covered with manure and mud. They work hard and keep well-clipped fields, fat cattle, and horses and mules in good fresh. When its time to make hay and harvest tobacco they come together, in community, to share the work. They are a people that love God, their families, their community, and their land. And, it is the land that provides the bond that completes the whole of it and establishes the nexus to the spiritual reality.

But there is an underlying contradiction; more precisely a conflict best described by Berry’s honest lawyer, Wheeler Catlett, in the story, The Wild Birds, “What he was struggling to make clear is the process by which unbridled economic forces draw life, wealth, and intelligence off the farms and out of the country towns and set them into conflict with their sources.” In this conflict, as Berry tells his readers, “price wars against value.”

But, it is the proverbial “good fight” that Wheeler wages. He fights for a humane way of life quickly dying out, fading into memory, but he fights none-the-less. “He does not forget -- it has been a long time since he was able to forget -- that he is making his stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country, from which many have departed and much has been sent away, a land wasting and dying for want of human names and knowledge that could give it life.”

It is the beloved and irascible Burley Coulter who remembered when it all went “wayward,” when the old way of life began to die off. “And then, about the end of the last world war, I reckon, I seen it go wayward….(T)hey began to go and not come back -- or a lot more did than had before. And now look at how many are gone…the mold they were made in done throwed away, and the young ones dead in the wars or killed in damned automobiles, or gone off to college and made too smart ever to come back, or gone off to easy money and bright lights and ain’t going to work in the sun ever again if they can help it.”

Wendell Berry is not merely sounding the knell of the American family farm. He has reached deeply into the soul of these people and described those things that make us inherently human: their love of God, family, and friends, and their care of the land. Some fail but that failure only underscores the nature of man. In The Boundary, perhaps the finest American short story ever written, Berry describes the end of Mat Feltner’s long and productive life. I worried for old Mat in much the same way I worried for my father at the end of his life. But Berry can do that to his readers, he makes you remember, and maybe that’s when you become one of the membership.

Of all the characters that Berry has created perhaps Ptolemy Proudfoot is my favorite. He was a gentleman, faithful husband, and caring farmer. His love for his wife, Miss Minnie, knew no limit. But Mr. and Mrs. Proudfoot were never able to have children, the one thing they wanted more than anything else in life. In his touching story, The Solemn Boy, which takes place during the height of the Depression, they are visited by strangers -- a transient and his son. After the Proudfoot’s had fed them and provided the boy with a warm coat the visitors take their leave. Miss Minnie, recalling the story many years later, remembered Tol’s words, “ We could have used a boy like that.” And, when she’d finished the story she said, “Mr. Proudfoot always wished we’d had some children. He never said so, but I know he did.” But then, Ptolemy Proudfoot would never say a word to hurt Miss Minnie’s feelings.

Before his time is over I hope Mr. Berry takes us back to the time when the Feltner’s, Catlett’s, and Coulter’s came into the Kentucky country. Were their progeny Confederates or Lincolnites? I would like to know more about these people.

Wendell Berry is America’s finest novelist and That Distant Land, a book that contains both a map of the Port William area and a genealogy of the families, is an excellent place to begin your journey with the Port William membership.

Bob Cheeks has written for The American Enterprise, Human Events, Southern Partisan, and The Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

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