Faith, Fiction, Friends: “Andy Catlett: Early Travels” by Wendell Berry

When I was almost nine years old, I did something that very few people in my extended family had done. I flew in an airplane. It was a Delta Airlines flight from New Orleans to Shreveport, and I would be spending a week with my grandmother.

It was a big deal, most of all for me. I’d never gone anywhere before without one or both of my parents. And here I was, on an airplane! The stewardess (that’s what they called flight attendants back then), sat with me for a time, looking at my penny collection (I brought it with me), chatting nicely, likely worried about an unaccompanied minor on his first flight. She figured out I thought this was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to me, and she soon returned to her regular duties.

I was reminded of that trip when I read Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry. Andy is nine years old, it’s the week between Christmas 1942 and New Years 1943. And for the first time ever, he will be riding a bus to visit both sets of grandparents in Port William, Kentucky. It’s not a long trip, but it’s an exciting one for a boy to take by himself.

He stays first with his father’s parents at their farm. It has none of the modern conveniences, including an indoor bathroom. But that doesn’t matter to a young boy, who’s with people and a place he loves. A few days later, his maternal grandfather comes to pick him up, and he stays with his mother’s family in the town of Port William itself. They do have indoor plumbing.

The younger Wendell Berry

Andy is telling the story of both sets of grandparents when he himself is a grandfather, and “the only one left” of his own family. In retrospect, he sees the great divide bought by the war, the time before and the time after. He knows who will die in the war, and how that will change the families. His father’s family represents the fast-disappearing old ways, and his mother’s family the new, although they, too, belong to the old era. And he understands what links him to the old era, what he learned from that time, and the values he continues to carry because of it. Andy Catlett: Early Travels is a story about many things, but the one that keeps ever-present is gratitude.

Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.

Before I read this short novel, I first read a related short story, “Andy Catlett: Early Education.” I was not the mischievous boy trying to push adults to find their breaking line, but I had an older brother who did, as did my own oldest child. The story is a lough-out-loud story of a boy who finally meets his match in his mother.

The Andy Catlett short story and short novel evoke a time long past. And yet, as the older Andy would know, the past is never really past. I can still hear my grandmother re-fighting the Civil War. I remember sitting in companiable silence with a beloved uncle on the back step of his house, rifle at his side, waiting for one of the many cats living next door to jump the fence. I can still hear my aunt talking, as we rode the bus from her home in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the French Quarter to do research in the Louisiana Historical Library – and her non-stop conversation.

That’s what Wendell Berry is writing about in Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and it is something I will always treasure.