When you say the word “Kentucky”, most Americans think of long-time Republican senator Mitch McConnell, arguably the man behind the curtain in the present US governmental collapse, as well as of horse racing and tobacco, not necessarily in that order. The octogenarian writer, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry, a native Kentuckian who has been hailed as “a prophet” by the New York Times, has a more nuanced view of his home state, and presents it with precision and care in this collection of short stories written over 40 years and centred on a group of (male) friends and relatives in a town near the Kentucky River, a little south of the Ohio border.
The title of Berry’s collection, Stand By Me, reflects his overall theme, which is an exploration, covering about a century, of the loyalties and interactions between fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, cousins and brothers. All the protagonists are raised on chancy farms in a hilly, difficult spot for farming; bad weather is a constant threat, only a few portions of a property can be put to use, and the fallbacks if crops fail are hunting, felling trees and hoping for some good luck. The communities where the stories are set can’t be said to have prospered and, by the late 20th century, they are depopulating and in decline.
Certain aspects of the local culture are so accepted that it seems they hardly deserve comment either by characters or author: the extermination of the Native Americans, the history of slavery, the assumption that women are to keep up with the housework but have no inner lives, the way that pistols and shotguns are as standard as hoes and shovels. Berry’s characters – Andy Coulter, Burley Coulter, Danny Branch, Art Rowanberry and others – have left home once or twice, but have returned, and their focus is on the simultaneous experience of perception and memory as they explore a territory that feeds their senses and their consciousness day after day. With this, Berry is getting at something unusual in modern-day America: the choice not to get out of town but to stick with your relatives and your landscape no matter what the ups and downs. As a result, the plots of the stories revolve around how each of the characters negotiates a life event – how Burley goes to the hospital, how Danny discovers who his father is, how people react to an unexpected suicide.
Of the 18, the stories I like best are “The Wild Birds”, “Fidelity” and “At Home”. In the first, an elderly lawyer is looking out of the window of his office on a Saturday afternoon, reflecting that a once busy main street is now deserted. Burley Coulter comes in and declares that he wants to change his will. The lawyer is a little dismayed, yet unsurprised. He thinks, “Burley Coulter’s faults have been public entertainment in the town and neighbourhood of Port William since he was a boy … His escapades have now, by retelling, worn themselves as deeply into that countryside as its back roads.”
In “Fidelity”, set some years later, the will’s new beneficiary kidnaps Burley from the hospital, where he is comatose and hooked up to medical equipment. His relatives know that Burley would have hated having his life preserved for the hospital to profit, but they have to tread the legal path (as represented by the local police detective) lightly and with cunning. In “At Home”, Art Rowanberry – a stand-in, I am guessing, for Berry himself – takes a walk in the woods with his old hunting dog, and reflects on what he has learned, how he learned it, and how his habits have evolved. Apparently in his 70s, Art is aware of the bad things that have happened in the spots he is walking through: “His thoughts were placed and peopled, and they seemed to come to him on their own, without any effort of his to call them up.” He feels open to the present moment, but detailed memories of his grandparents and their legacy are just as vivid. Not only did they do the best they could, often making mistakes, “They had paid to live resignedly as they expected to die.”
Though politics aren’t mentioned, Berry also gives us the way that Trump voters perceive the world. Old habits, long loyalties, attachment to place and tradition come first. His characters return again and again to what they know, enjoying it, validating it, contemplating its connection to their loved ones. They are generally well meaning, but guns, for example, are an essential part of their lives. Everyone knows something could go wrong, but folk take a fatalistic view of all accidents and misbehaviours – better the sins we know than the virtues we do not. Do I forgive them for repeatedly re-electing Mitch McConnell? No, but after reading Stand By Me, I get it.