Nathan Coulter

I hadn't heard of Wendell Berry before he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. He was a poet and novelist who wrote several books about the fictional Kentucky town of Port William. I read the first, Nathan Coulter, which was published in 1960. It is a charming little gem.

Set in the late '30s, Nathan is a teen-aged boy living on his parents' farm. He helps with the work, but has plenty of time to have fun with his older brother Tom and his roguish Uncle Burley, who disdains work and has a shack on the river where he likes to drink whiskey.

The boys' mother dies, and they go to live with her grandparents. Later, Tom and his father will have a fight and Tom will go off on his own. The book ends with the grandfather passing away.

Nathan Coulter is very short and written beautifully, though without any pretense or flourishes. Nathan narrates it and he is a plain speaker. Here's Nathan on his mother's coffin: "The inside of the coffin looked snug and soft, but when they shut the lid it would be dark. When they shut the lid and carried her to the grave it would be like walking on a cloudy dark night when you can’t see where you’re going or what’s in front of you. And after they put her in the ground and covered her up she’d turn with the world in the little dark box in the grave, and the days and nights would all be the same."

Mostly the Coulters have a connection to the land, where they farm tobacco. "Grandpa had owned his land and worked on it and taken his pride from it for so long that we knew him, and he knew himself, in the same way that we knew the spring. His life couldn’t be divided from the days he’d spent at work in his fields."

One of the reasons I was attracted to this book is that my ancestors lived in Kentucky, not too far from where the Coulters do. These could have easily been my relatives. They were farmers, too. Some of the book is very funny, and has the aura of stories that are passed down from generation to generation. One very funny set piece is when the brothers visit a carnival: "It was bad enough to know such things as eight-hundred-pound women and two-headed babies could be in the world without paying a quarter for it." They end up inside a burlesque tent where a woman takes off all her clothes. Another amusing section is when Nathan and Uncle Burly go raccoon hunting in the middle of the winter night. They stop for the night at Jig Pendleton's houseboat. He gives them some food, and Burley some whiskey, and they skin the raccoons.

One thing I'm puzzled by: Nathan never mentions school, even in the winter months. Could be that he had already quit school (he's probably about fifteen). I imagine a lot of boys did then so they could be a constant help on the farm.