I like Burley Coulter. I like him, at least in part, because he “caused a lot of trouble for himself and other people,” as Wendell Berry puts it. Burley is a member of Berry’s fictitious town of Port William, the setting for novels such as Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter. He is one of the most interesting and well-written characters in the Port William series and, really, one of the best characters in modern fiction. You can’t read about him without wanting to be a little bit like him. Setting aside any real sin, you even want to get in the kind of trouble he gets into. But the attraction is deeper than that. Though he is flawed, there is a raw, earthy sanity about him, a pervasive humanness that we are drawn to — Burley Coulter is able to work and to love.
We meet him early in Nathan Coulter, the opening book of the series. To Nathan (and to those readers who first enter Port William through that initial installment) he is, forever, Uncle Burley. The name is fitting: he is a burly sort of fellow, who prefers to be outdoors and who is proficient in all manner of manly doings.
Uncle Burley is a skilled farmhand. He is adept at plowing with mules and countless other tasks. He is also described as disappearing into the wilderness for days, living from fishing and hunting. On the farm or in the forest, or anywhere really, he is good at what he does. And as you get to know him, you realize you don’t just want to be like him, you want to be able to do the things he’s able to do. But Burley’s skill isn’t just practical. Through his skill and his particular presence, he is life-giving to his community.
He can lighten drudgery with humor, getting the job done while helping others get through it. And that draws us to him even more deeply. This excerpt is from Hannah Coulter, with Hannah describing him:
“Many hands make light work,” . . . that is right, up to a point. And there is a certain kind of talk that lightens the work too. Burley was a master of that. When the work was hard or hot or miserable, or when we were suffering our weariness at the end of a long day, we would hear him singing out: “It’s root, hog, or die, boys! I was kicked out of Hell for playing in the ashes! All I want is a good single line mule and a long row!”
Later we see Burley working with two boys, one of them lazy and disinclined to do the work at hand and the other one overzealous and eager to a fault. To the former, he gives the right kind of encouragement, and to the latter, he aptly taps the brakes on his youthful drive. In this, I see a man who doesn’t learn a few things and then impose them on everyone with smug surety. He is competent with reins and hammers, but also with hearts and egos.
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