I think it’s obvious that “A Half-Pint of Old Darling” is by far the greatest love story that ever appeared in a journal devoted to draft horses.
Wendell Berry, one of the great living American writers, farms in Kentucky using traditional methods, including mules and draft horses. Some of his stories appeared in The Draft Horse Journal, this one in 1993.
The story is about Miss Minnie and Tol. They’d been married a dozen years in 1920, when women got the right to vote and Prohibition began. The story is about how people who love each other and know each other can still discover new things.
It took Tol a while to figure out Minnie could whistle. He was delighted when she reeled off some folk tunes, although he thought of the proverb:
These will come to no good end:
A whistling woman and a crowing hen.
In the fall, the two go shopping. It’ a good trip to town by horse and buggy. They buy presents for each other. Without thinking about it, Tol stops at the pharmacy for a half-pint of whiskey, which he uses during lambing season to encourage weak little hearts to beat.
Tol is the kind of thinker who can get lost in his thoughts, and on the way home he’s off somewhere when Minnie discovers the half-pint under the wagon seat.
She is so disappointed in her husband.
Crushed, she decides to save him from himself. In a dramatic gesture, she takes one snort after another. Tol rejoins the world when Minnie starts hollering campaign slogans to people in oncoming buggies.
I like the story because I think a long, happy marriage can include moments of surprise and anger, maybe even blind fury.
• Source: Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories (The Civil War to World War II) ; Library of America, 2018. Library of America offers a free Story of the Week, a service I love. You can find this story in the archives. You can sign up here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org.
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