Fiction

The Boundary

“The Boundary” is one of the short stories in Wendell Berry’s The Wild Birds. I reread it this week and found it as extraordinarily powerful as I did the first time over 15 years ago. It’s about Mat Feltner, a figure well-known to those familiar with the Port William community of Berry’s fiction. In this story, Mat is 80 years old and physically weak. One day Mat goes to check on a fenceline he’s worried may not be in good repair.

That boundary turns out to be in good shape, solid and well maintained by Nathan Coulter, who has shouldered much of the hard labor of the Feltner farm in Mat’s declining health. But the other boundaries Mat encounters on his afternoon walk into the woods are more permeable: the boundaries between past and present, between time and eternity, between life and death. His pleasant walk down the creek, and the labor to return, turn into a life and death struggle.

One of the themes of the tale is the presentness of the past. It’s a recurring idea in Berry’s writing, and here it’s manifest through Mat’s journey through a woods populated with ghosts, people who have worked with him along the creek and left their memory and their mark on the land. The effect is to collapse all times together, and the suggestion of an eternity released from linear time becomes even more significant when Mat thinks, time and again, “I could stay here.” But what keeps him going in the effort to get back home is his love for Margaret, waiting and worrying, he knows, at home.

I always marvel at the prescience with which Berry writes about old age. He is someone who has listened, like Andy Catlett in The Memory of Old Jack, to the stories of the elderly, and he’s learned well the paths they travel from past to present and back again. Part of the power of this story is in Berry’s ability to bring the reader into the same experience of empathy. I have the sense when I read that this tale is a commemoration of stories Berry has listened to, whether in the exact details or simply in the perfect recreation of the mind of someone inhabiting that boundary between present and past.

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