Watch with Me

In these seven interrelated stories, the reader is again invited to Port William, Kentucky, the fictional community in which Wendell Berry has set his vivid characters over the entire course of his thirty-year career. Readers familiar with Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Remembering, and Fidelity will welcome the chance to revisit this countryside and its cast of lively characters. Newcomers are in for a particular treat.

Never has Wendell Berry seemingly had so much fun as he does in telling the seven tall tales of Ptolemy Proudfoot, "a member of a large clan of large people." Tol Proudfoot is a farmer, a longtime bachelor at war with his clothes. The work of arriving in a presentable fashion at the harvest festival in order to court Miss Minnie, Port William's schoolmarm, is an epic battle:.

After all his waiting and anxiety, his clothes were damp and wrinkled, his shirttail was out, there was horse manure on one of his shoes. His hat sat athwart his head as though left there by somebody else... he came in wide-eyed, purposeful and alarmed... He'd made, he thought, a serious mistake.

But Miss Minnie is actually delighted to have "Mr. Proudfoot," as she always calls him, bid on her cake at the bake auction for a princely sum, and pleased, too, to have him see her home. The other stories in Part One lovingly tell of their long married life together from 1908 through the Second World War.

Part Two consists of the single, startlingly beautiful title story "Watch with Me," in which the depth of affection and tolerance for eccentricity that is borne by these neighbors toward one of their own is movingly explored. Each of the stories shows the changes that the twentieth century is visiting upon rural Port William and its interwoven community of family and friends. This collection is rich with humor and wisdom.