An elderly woman once told me she was making a long trip back to her hometown for the little community’s autumn apple festival. She had returned many times for the festival—an annual ritual of her girlhood and young adulthood—but this time was different. Now in her 80s, she said, “I’m going back home for what I’m sure will be the last time.” It felt awkward to press the point, but I wondered what it must be like to see a familiar event lose the expected promise of next year.
I felt something of that ache when I realized I might well be visiting for the last time a beloved, familiar community that I’ve traveled to over and over again since adolescence. The difference is that this community does not exist. Or rather, this place, Port William, exists in the imagination of Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry.
Those of us who have savored his novels and short stories—with the familiar generations of Catletts and Coulters—can see that when Berry is gone, Port William will be gone too. No one else can or should write it.
Berry knows this too. The mind that can cite King Lear and Paradise Lost from memory line upon line knows the poetry of the King James Bible even better, certainly well enough to quote the psalmist’s assertion that our lives are 70 years or, “by reason of strength,” maybe 80. He also knows that this same psalm tells us those allotted years are soon gone, “and we fly away” (90:10, ESV).
Now over 90 years old, Berry seems to have embedded in his latest novel, Marce Catlett, a kind of last word for his readers—a goodbye from Port William to us.
Port William is, as I noted, fictional, but not in the manner of Xanadu, Oz, or Middle-earth. It is grounded self-consciously in the folklore of Berry’s real-life homeplace, Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky. That puts an even more melancholy frame around this novel, because it seems like a goodbye to Port Royal in our world just as much as to Port William in his.
The novel is a combination of origin story and apocalypse. Andy Catlett, the character most similar to and often read as a stand-in for Berry, narrates the story from the perspective of a man grown old. Andy reflects on what he now sees as the pivotal moment of his family’s life: his grandfather Marcellus Catlett riding by train to Louisville for an auction sale, his entire year’s tobacco crop packed into hogsheads—only to learn that he will be coming home with little more than it cost to get there due to the price-rigging of the monopolistic Duke Trust.
“If Marce was going home with nothing from that day’s sale, he was not going home to nothing,” Andy remembers. And indeed, he was not. From the humiliation of that defeat, the novel shows us how Marce and his family returned to the work of farming: “He had been defeated, but he was not destroyed.” The scene of the elder Catlett telling his worried wife about what he had lost transforms their son, Wheeler, who becomes a lawyer and policymaker advocating for agrarian communities like his own.
For a time, of course, these complementary responses work. As in all of Berry’s stories, the little things—raising a family, tending a field, burying a neighbor—are what really matter in the end. And Wheeler’s work matters too. He is instrumental in getting a New Deal–era tobacco cooperative formed that is run not by distant Washington bureaucrats but by the farmers themselves.
Then, of course, tobacco is discovered to cause cancer. And more ominously, the mechanization and regimentation of agriculture—and of virtually everything else—destroys what held Port William together.
Several persistent Berry themes are here. One is the importance of community as drawn from Paul’s epistles (1 Cor. 12:12–31), not as an abstract concept but as membership and belonging to one another. This book defines the “only rule of membership: When any of them needed help, the others came to help.”
“By extension of their one rule, there was no ‘settling up,’” Berry writes, in implicit contrast with the tobacco monopoly. “All help was paid for in advance by the knowledge that there would be no end to anybody’s need for help, which would be given to the limit of life and strength.”
This membership is a covenant between not just those who live among each other but also between the living and the dead. The story unveils in quiet power what Berry has told us in his previous works: That covenant has been broken.
The novel also clearly identifies the villains: First, the tobacco monopoly; then, the government that pulled away the tobacco program; and then, behind all of that, the mechanization of farming paired with the “upward mobility” of generations into cities and exurbs.
If you ever wanted to see Elon Musk show up in a Port William story, here he is (unnamed but unmistakable):
The good, frugal farmers who drove their first tractors into the fields around Port William were entering, without knowing it, the technological romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and the billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer “space,” invade Mars, a place better known to them than the country that grows their food.
Berry has always argued that big problems require one to, in the words of his 1970 essay, “think little.” He once told a group of environmental activists that they mistakenly believed the solution to a problem should match the scope of the problem itself. In reality, as he argued in one book of essays, The Way of Ignorance, “the great problems call for many small solutions.”
But Marce Catlett feels, more than most of Berry’s other novels, resigned to defeat. Reflecting on his father, his grandfather, and himself, Andy Catlett says, “What we wanted was to make a life and a way of life, here in this place, that our children and their children could take from us and carry on. And each of us, in his own way in his own time, has failed.”
This felt fatalism is a necessary—but not final—through line. One of the most startling scenes is one in which old man Andy, reflecting on that defeated trip of his grandfather’s, starts to pray for him. “Oh, stand by him,” he prays. “Let him come home.” As Berry writes,
Andy never before has prayed or heard of so displacing a prayer, which sets him outside such sense as he has so far been able to make, outside even of time and into the great outside, the eternity maybe it is, that contains time. He seems to have spoken not from his own heart only, but from the hearts also of his grandma and grandpa, his mother, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, and others, many others, or he is praying their prayers as they stand with him in that boundless outside.
Without articulating it this way, Andy seems to experience the epiphany that T. S. Eliot conveyed from the rose garden at Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” Andy comes to see that, in this opening between time and eternity, he, his father, and his grandfather are contemporaries possessed of a common vision; they are in fact brothers.
It is not just that the story continues from one generation to the next—although that’s certainly part of it. Rather, the story is held together, somehow, in eternity itself.
Berry has always understood and communicated the sense that Israel was part of a story that began far before, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In Marce Catlett, Berry also seems to emphasize what Jesus said to the Sadducees who denied the resurrection from the dead—that God remains the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27).
Because of this, the redemption in this story is not found in some dramatic plot twist at the end but in the telling of the story itself. Of Andy Catlett’s adolescence away at school, Berry wrote, “In those days nobody knew that he was a boy who belonged to a story. In those days he did not know it himself.” But he comes to realize the force of the story of his grandfather’s loss and thus comes to understand his father: “Because of the story, there were some kinds of a man that Wheeler could not be, a certain kind that he had to become, and certain things that he had to do.”
Andy moves from remembering the Catlett family story to inhabiting it. But not all at once. The story does the slow, small work of planting sequoias, as Berry’s “mad farmer” advises in a poem. The fact that Andy could awaken to its meaning enough to enter it himself leaves the possibility that others will do the same.
That memory doesn’t resolve into a tidy moral or a plan of action—all of Berry’s preaching aside. But it forms a certain kind of being that comes from a certain kind of knowing that “all turns on affection,” as Berry noted elsewhere. Andy comes to realize that Marce could only have shouldered this defeat with the bearings of a man who
had lived long and ably in a place and in ways intimately loved and known—or, as Andy has come to realize, intimately loved and therefore known, intimately known and therefore loved.
Andy comes to see, only with the clarity of old age, that “his remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it.”
At the end of Marce Catlett, I realized this is not the end of Port William. All its stories still exist. There’s a reason Mr. Berry took us backward and forward in the timeline. He was teaching us how to love a people and a place, if only in our imagination, and those stories are still there.
Near the end of the book, Berry writes, “As he has come to know, Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude.” I thought about this as I realized what I was feeling was indeed grief; the odds are low that I will ever get to read a new Port William story for the first time. The grief and the gratitude go together.
And so, maybe the right response is to pray for Wendell Berry—not the old Wendell Berry in Henry County right now, but somehow the young Wendell Berry making the decision Andy Catlett once made: to root himself in a place where he could tell us these stories that require of us to be certain kinds of people, with certain kinds of things we must love and certain kinds of things we must do.
That young Berry probably knows that he will end up heartbroken. “Oh, stand by him,” we might pray. “Let him come home.”
Russell Moore is editor in chief at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Good Night, Port William".
Related
