Don’t Send A Boy To Do A Man’s Work by Wendell Berry, 2004
The magic trick:
Breaking the established narrative point of view occasionally by using quotes from the child protagonist looking back from adulthood on the incident at hand
We continue our week of chronological exploration of Wendell Berry’s Port Williams – via his That Distant Land collection.
This story employs some unique techniques. I did a literal double take when in the middle of the narrative we get a quote from the child protagonist apparently now grown up and looking back decades on the story’s day in question. It’s almost like the way a newspaper reporter would drop in a quote from the principal into the article.
Very strange. But I like it.
It gives the entire thing the feel of a community story being passed down by our narrator, who no longer is an invisible third-person god, but instead is a member of the Port William sharing this history with us.
And that’s quite a trick on Berry’s part.
The selection:
When he got to Carter Keith’s barn lot, he set the keg on a big chopping block that had been upended in a handy place. “Boys,” he said, “Jim Pete wants you to kill one for him, and he’s furnishing the whiskey.”
And there that keg sat in the midst of the people, like the golden calf.
Mr. Dewey Fields, who was the senior man of them, eyed it as if that was exactly what it was. “We ain’t having none of that here,” he said.
And not another one of them said a word.
“That,” Athey later would say, “was when I ought to have picked up the axe that was leaning right there and split the keg wide open. I was big enough to do it and I had the right. But that was when I played the boy and not the man. After that, I stayed a boy more or less to the end of it.”
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