Wendell Berry - The Long-Legged House

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THE FURNITURE MAKER is at work in the shade of some box elder trees that grow on the slope of the road-fill out at the end of his yard. Two chair posts, held by a system of pegs and wedges as in a vise, are on the puncheon bench in front of him. He is cutting the mortises into which he will later insert hewn slats to make the back of the chair. He uses a sharpened screwdriver as a chisel, driving it with a heavy hand ax. Nearby is another sort of homemade vise, this one made by pinning the longer member of an inverted treefork into a mortise in another puncheon bench, so that the shape is roughly that of the figure 4. This he uses to hold pieces to be shaped with a drawing knife; he sits in a low chair at the end of the bench, holding his foot against the leg of the 4, by that leverage supplying the holding power of the vise.

From the tree in the woods to the finished chair, the materials are handled by no hands but the furniture makers own. In the process he uses only a few simple tools: a crosscut saw, an ax, a hand ax, a drawing knife, an auger, a pocketknife, a rasp, and the screwdriver sharpened into a mortising chisel. He also has a press that he uses to set the desired curves into chair backs and rockers. One needs to see him at work in order to understand how adequately his patient craftsmanship performs tasks that are usually done now by machines.

While he works, four of his children, who have come there to the shady place with him, play with the tools he is not using or swing in the swings he has made for them in the box elders.

Held in such narrow focus, revealing only the man at work and the few primitive tools, the scene might be thought to belong to some happily simple time in the past. But it is not in the past, and it is not happy. It belongs to the coal country of East Kentucky in the summer of 1965; it belongs to the tragedy of that country and its people, and to the shame, acknowledged or not, of what some still like to call the American way of life.

The furniture maker, who moved down onto the state road in the hope that he might sell some of his work to passers-by and travelers, lives in an old scale house once used by a coal company to weigh trucks. The house is built of rough-sawed lumber, covered with the rather flimsy material called brick siding; it has had no upkeep for years, and one can see that in cold weather it must be difficult to heat. The yard is partly a fill of coal rubble, dumped and leveled around the house, which stands bare in the hot sun. It is the most meager home site imaginable, starkly and heavily ugly, sterile and coal-stained and raw. The children who play and swing there in the shade are poorly clothed. Only the seven-year-old girl attends school, but the furniture maker and his wife will be dependent again this fall on the uneasy charity that gives away secondhand clothes. The furniture maker speaks of his distress over the presence of a store in the childs school. The store sells popsicles and candy and such to the children, and it is one of the furniture makers cruel burdens, for it requires him either to send the child to school with nickels he cant afford or to have the familys poverty made painfully obvious to herand all her classmatesevery day.

Unable to live by his work, the furniture maker is dependent on the governments welfare program, the benefits of which are somewhat questionable, since if he sells any of his work his welfare payments are diminished accordingly, and so he stands little or no chance of improving his situation by his own effort. Only the workmans loving pride in his work can explain why he has continued to make any effort at all.

Getting out of the car there at the edge of the road, standing up to face that black yard and the bitter shambles of a house, you are inclined to forget the good you know of the place, and to be overcome by a foreboding of hopelessness that by being theirs is also mysteriously yours. It becomes a strong temptation to get back into the car and drive away, to take refuge in the thousand lies we have invented to justify the divine right to be mindlessly rich.

But once you have come upon the furniture maker at his work this initial pressing of futility is, if not replaced, at least driven back by the excellence of the workmanship being accomplished with those crude tools in defiance of the poverty of place and circumstance. And this is supported by the sight of a large well-tended garden down in the creek bottom; the furniture maker is attempting to sell some of the produce in a makeshift stand beside the road, and his wife has been busy canning and preserving.

There comes the awareness, as it still must come here and there throughout the Kentucky mountains, that as a measure of the depth of misery there still remains a height of pridea sort of last stand of hopefulness shaped in a neat garden, a few flowers in bloom. It may be only because of this that the misery itself does not yet represent the dead end of vision. One can bear the knowledge of the furniture makers situation because there remains in the man himself the promise as well as the hope of something better.

Though the furniture makers house and household wear the look of long poverty that is commonplace in the region, there are significant differences between his predicament and that of most. For while most of the poor have become so because of the lack of employment, the furniture maker still applies himself industriously to his work. And while most are handicapped by lack of skills, the furniture maker is a consummate craftsman. While the mentality of most has been conditioned by a long dependence on coal company and union, the furniture maker is self-employed and in full possession of the discipline and pride of the craftsman who is his own boss. And in a region, moreover, which has suffered a thorough social upheaval in the change from a dependence on the land to a dependence on industry, the furniture maker came to his work by inheritance. Asked how he learned his craft, he replies: It come to me from my ancestors.

The furniture makers predicament is that though he has work, it is work that is very near to being useless and meaningless. He is prevented, as I have said, from using it to augment his income from the welfare program. And he is bound to the program by his inability to make a living entirely from his work. He lacks, for one thing, a dependable market. Such furniture as he makes is either not sufficiently valued by enough people to assure a market, or the affluent passers-by who are his potential customers simply refuse to believe that anything of value could be produced in such a place. For another thing, he is so slowed by his old tools that he could hardly make more furniture than he does even if he had more customers. It takes him, for instance, about a month to make one of the large rocking chairs that bring from seventy to ninety dollars. He can sell only three or four of these a year, and most of his time is taken up by articles from which he earns much less.

For fear that this will seem to anyone to be a sentimental defense of an anachronism, I hurry to say that this mans work, particularly in his chairs, is among the finest I have ever seen. The chairs are certainly the strongest and best-made of their kind that I know of. They are beautifully proportioned and balanced. Such ornamentation as is used is modest, and tasteful in a way that transcends fashionableness. They are made to last a lifetime and more, and their strength is achieved without expense of grace. It is hard to think of a room, rich or poor, that would not be dignified by the presence of one of them, and impossible to imagine a householder who would need to condescend to own one.