Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry
Andy Catlett narrates his visit to his grandparents’s homes in Port William, Kentucky over several days at the end of December 1943. The Andy who tells the story is telling it decades in the future; the Andy who lives it is nine years old and travels alone for the first time and by bus, from his home in neighboring Hargrave.
During his visit, Andy Catlett describes his adult relatives and their neighbors, their homes, the foods they eat, the work that they perform, and their interactions with one another. Among the relatives and neighbors are some who get their own book-length stories: Jack Beechum, Hannah (later Hannah Coulter) and Jayber Crow. Although he does not get his own book, Burley Coulter also features prominently in this and other Port William stories.
Andy Catlett: Early Travels is a charming story, but it is also an elegy. The Andy Catlett who tells the story, in looking back, acknowledges that young Andy Catlett is living in a world that will be dramatically changed in his lifetime. When he arrives at his his paternal grandparents home, he is met at the bus by Grandpa (Marcelus Catlett) and Dick in a mule-drawn wagon. Mules and horses power the farm work and provide transportation. The farmhouse and barn are lit by oil lamps. Cooking and heating the home and the water for hygiene and laundry are accomplished by burning wood. Water must be drawn from a well.
Midway through his visit to Port William Andy transitions to the mechanized world. His paternal Granddaddy, Matt Feltner, picks him up in an automobile and brings him to a home with electricity, central heating, and indoor plumbing. This is what Andy’s world will be, and the speed at which life will be lived will increase dramatically as a result. No part of life will be left untouched, and the touch will not often result in improvement as far as the narrator is concerned.
Still, in closing the elegy, the elder Andy Catlett expresses thanks for what how the experience has touched him:
And now, as often before, I am reminded how grateful I am to have been there, in that time, with these I have remembered. I was there with them; they remain here with me. For in that little while Port William sank into me, becoming one with the matter and light, and the darkness, of my mind, never again to be far from my thoughts, no matter where I went or what I did.
Jersey Backyard 