The Memory of Old Jack
by Wendell Berry
also by Wendell Berry ...
A World Lost
It is summer of 1944, and nine-year-old Andy Catlett is engrossed in the big easy countryside near Port William, Kentucky—the clear cool water of Chatham Spring, fields full of tumblebugs and meadowlarks, and a sky so huge that it seems “a great gape of vision.” But calamity strikes Andy’s world on a hot July afternoon when his Uncle Andrew is murdered.
“I was his hand, his boy, his buddy.... I had wanted to be like him. It had not occurred to me to want to be like anybody else.” Life’s direct simplicity is suddenly gone, replaced by sadness, loss, and the mystery surrounding Uncle Andrew’s death. No one tells the boy why his uncle and namesake was murdered, and the question follows Andy into manhood.
Wendell Berry tackles the slippery nature of truth as Andy gathers fragments of recollection years after the murder, accumulating details about his uncle’s death and life. Through the process he comes to learn the limits of fact, that “the truth about us, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.”
Andy’s journey through time also leads him to a new understanding of his grandparents, parents, and the neighbors and friends who have stood by his family for decades. Through them all he comes to see himself as part of a great continuum of love and memory, grief and strength.
—dust jacket, 1996 Counterpoint edition
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