hand to mouth in the world of merchandise

The following is a brief reading from Wendell Berry's novel The Memory of Old Jack. I will refer to this passage in an upcoming post. Contained here are the thoughts of Mat Feltner, a farmer with longstanding roots in Berry's fictional Port William, KY, concerning his hired help Lightning Berlew, who is a working man ever typical in our age.

And now here comes Lightning Berlew. Mat told him when he moved in that he would expect him to be at the barn at five, before breakfast, to help do the morning chores; he could milk one of the cows for himself.

"I don't want no milk," Lightning said, and he came out no earlier than six-thirty.

Mat offered him a plot of ground and the use of whatever tools he needed to make a garden. Lightning did not even bother to refuse.

Mat said nothing. He had recognized his adversary by then and knew he would have to settle for what he could get, as long as there was anything to get. He even knew how it would end: one morning the house would be empty and the old car gone; he would know neither why nor where nor exactly when.

"Morning," he says.

"Hidy!" says Lightning. He is taking his time, the picture of the man of leisure, head tilted back, picking his teeth with the sharpened butt of a burnt match. He comes across the lot and steps in front of Mat.

"Take the tractor and wagon," Mat says, "and go get with Nathan and the others and help them. I'll be there as soon as I can."

Lightning grins his most accommodating grin, his mouth full of silver and gold. With perfect condescension he says, "Well, I expect I'm just a little bit ahead of you." He bites down on to the match and reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes.

It makes Mat furious. But, as he often does, he deals with his anger by being correctly generous. He had another thing in mind.

"Lightning." he says, "do you want to kill a hog for yourself this fall?"

"Huh?"

"Do you want a meat hog?"

"I might."

"Well, you can have one of mine. But you'll have to pen it down at your house and feed it out."

"I just might," Lightning says. He goes to get the tractor.

Mat stands still a moment, letting his anger subside, and then starts down towards town.

Lightning will not take the hog. Mat knows that. Then why did he ask? Because it is right? To walk the second mile? Maybe. But maybe, too, for some perverse fascination in seeing the man so steadfastly proove himself a fool. Maybe to allow him to elaborate the accusation there is to be made against him. Mat knows, he knows perfectly well, what Lightning will be doing. At night after work, instead of tending to a garden or feeding a hog or doing anything that might be of permanent good to him, instead of even just sitting still, he will have his old Chevrolet pulled into the barn door; he will be lying under it, trying to make it run well enough to get to Hargrave on a Saturday night. And while he works on the car, the lady Smoothbore [Lightning's wife] will be sitting there on a bucket, encouraging him, for she apparently has her own reasons for wanting to get to Hargrave. Though the two of them live and work on the place, they have no connection with it, no interest in it, no hope from it. They live, and appear content to live, from hand to mouth in the world of merchandise, connected to it by daily money poorly earned...