Revisiting Wendell Berry’s “Fidelity”

Yesterday, we buried my daughter’s hamster. She was injured a week ago, then endured a trip to the vet and a week of pain medication before quietly slipping away.

Did she die of her injuries — or of starvation because the medications so drugged her that she couldn’t eat? Did we help her feel more comfortable, as we so longed to do — or did we increase her pain? Did the trip to the vet help or hurt? Bad enough that she was injured. Worse still if in the longing to help, we were complicit in further injury.

I don’t mean to trivialize the many large tragedies of the world, but the truth is there are no small deaths. Death, especially where any degree of love is involved, always brings us face to face with difficulties and mysteries.

For the Christian, this is a week when the questions of suffering and death and mystery are in the air anyway. I wish I could say that my reading of the Bible has been enough, but this year my threadbare imagination has needed help weaving together the different strands that trouble my mind and heart with the familiar yet enduring mystery of the gospel story. I remembered that Wendell Berry’s short story “Fidelity,” from the collection of the same title, dealt with some of the things I’m thinking about, so I returned to it yesterday.

There will be spoilers here, so, fair warning.

“Fidelity” concerns the last days of Burley Coulter, a beloved member of the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. He is 82 years old and failing, and all those who love him are troubled with the feeling that they need to do something to help. So they take him to a doctor, who checks him into a hospital. Before long Burley is an unrecognizable wraith on a hospital bed, hooked up to needles and tubes under the glare of the institutional lights. How truly Berry writes the response of Burley’s friends and family:

When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that had been wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care” — which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.

So Danny Branch, Burley’s son, stages a rescue. I’m not sure why they don’t simply check him out of the hospital, but within the fictional situation Berry creates they are completely powerless. Danny goes to the hospital in the dead of night and takes Burley away with him to a place he knows, and the two spend his final hours together. Meanwhile, a detective questions Danny’s wife Lyda, lawyers Wheeler and Henry Catlett, and eventually the whole Port William membership as they gather in the Catlett offices — a conversation that lays bare the contrasts between the world of technology and organization and institution, and the world of Port William.

The plot borrows some of the ingredients of the Easter story, but made more immanent and less theological. There are several allusions, such as when the janitors at the hospital, watching as Danny wheels Burley away on a gurney, are “as stupefied, apparently, as the soldiers at the Tomb.” There are also two resurrections. Danny, who has hidden the unconscious Burley in a barn while he prepares to dig his grave, returns to check on Burley and is startled to find him awake, eyes open, looking at him. The second resurrection takes place just after Burley dies. As Danny goes back to digging the grave,

Burley returned to his mind, and he knew him again as he had been when his life was full. He saw again the stance and demeanor of the man, the amused eyes, the lips pressed together while speech waited upon thought, an almost inviolable patience in the set of his shoulders. It was as though Burley stood in full view nearby, at ease and well at home — as though Danny could see him, but only on condition that he not look.

One other notable reminder to me of the story’s resonance with Easter is the way Burley’s friends come together in Wheeler’s offices. It’s an upper room experience like those of the disciples after Jesus’ death, first when the Lord himself appears to them, then when the Holy Spirit comes. In this story, it’s Danny who comes into the assembly, bringing with him a spirit of peace: “The room was all ashimmer now with its quiet.” (This scene is beautiful for its contrast to the funeral scene in The Memory of Old Jack too. But I can’t write about everything…)

I love so many things about this story. I love the way Berry weaves his tale in with this larger one. I love the way he works out themes about the right purposes of law and medicine and technology (a theme that’s always percolating in my own thoughts). I love the characters he draws with such exact detail and affection.

Most of all I love the tenderness with which he writes of death and loss and love. Somehow at Easter we can get so focused on the theological import of what Christ has done that we miss the very human story of death and loss and love and confusion. “Fidelity” comforted me without tearing the veil from any of the mysteries, affirming the essential goodness of my longings for understanding and fellowship and meaning. It underlines not only the bewilderments and sorrows of our earthly experience, but the joys. It manages to weave together the strands of so many things I struggle with and hope for.

Sometimes we need the coherence that only poetry can provide. “Fidelity,” as well as the other stories in this collection, lends us the eyes of a poet who can glimpse an underlying unity, and capture in words those shimmers of meaning that go far beyond words.