The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership (review)

Berry, Wendell. The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. Hardback, $13.95. The Wild Birds, a collection of related short stories about the fictional Port William community, is the latest book by Kentucky's gifted poet, novelist, essayist and "mad farmer," Wendell Berry. This work, though perfectly abiete stand alone, develops further our knowledge of the land and characters described in Berry's novels, Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth and The Memory of Old Jack. These stories are set from 1930, a year of prohibition, drouth and depression, to 1967, when the small towns of rural Kentucky were dying and emptying out, when centers like "La Belle Riviere Shopping Plaza" were replacing fertile bottomland farms. Wheeler Catlett, the principal character of this book, sees himself as "making his last stand in the middle of a dying town in the midst of a wasting country." Though this book deals often enough with dying and decay, it is not a morose work, and it is sparked by the goodness, humor, language and vitality of its characters. Wheeler Catlett, like Wendell Berry himself, is a kind of "conservative." But not in the typical political sense—Wheeler is a conserver of good, humane values, a steward of the land, and even a protector of the dead. Such a stance has triade Wheeler seem at times a bit radical, unusual and nonconforming to the spirit of the age. What saves Wheeler from isolation, what nurtures the country people of these stories, what even binds the living to the dead in Port William, is the notion of membership. This motif runs through all the stories and is a mystical tie that binds people to each other and, strangely enough, to the land. Being part of this membership involves certain responsibilities and offers certain benefits. The benefits include meeting one's needs for food, shelter and spiritual sustenance, the pleasures of good work, humor and companionship, and comfort and consolation in times of trouble, sickness, or death. The responsibilities seem to involve love and care for one's land, care for those in need—including the undeserving "least brethren" (like the drunk, Uncle Peach)—and honoring of virtues like hard work, fidelity, and patience. The title of this collection is explained in the extraordinary story called "The Boundary." Here, the aged Mat Feltner tries to inspect his farm's boundary fences. In his condition and at his age this presents a nearly impossible task. As Mat desperately tries to find his way back to his wife and home, we watch as his mind rearranges time, flitting from his nineteenth century boyhood to his farm in the midtwentieth century. Berry writes, "He seems to be walking in and out of his mind.... The dead come near him, and he is among them. They come and go, appear and disappear, like a flock of feeding birds." In another story, "That Distant Land," Mat is slowly yet peacefully dying. Andy Catlett, Wheeler's son, narrates this fine passage: Once he woke me to recite me the Twenty-third Psalm. "Andy. Listen." He said the psalm to me. I lay listening to his old, slow voice coming through the dark to me, saying that he walked through the valley of the shadow of death and that he feared no evil. It stood my hair up. I had known that psalm all my life. I had heard it and said it a thousand times. But until then I had always felt that it came from a long way off, some place I had not lived. Now, hearing him speak it, it seemed to me for the first time to utter itself in our tongue and to wear our dust. The membership doesn't just demand responsibility for the honored dead and the 70 honorable living; it also includes the "least brethren," as shown in the story "Thicker Than Liquor." Here, in a narrative full of humor and pathos, the mystery of loving and suffering are explored as Wheeler takes care of his alcoholic Uncle Peach. Wheeler retrieves Peach from one of his periodic drunken binges in Louisville and tries to help this...