The following is a story from The Best Short Stories 2025: The O. Henry Prize Winners, chosen by guest editor Edward P. Jones and series editor Jenny Minton Quigley. Wendell Berry has lived with his wife, Tanya Amyx Berry, at Lanes Landing on the Kentucky River since 1965. He has written fairly steadily, and from time to time taught and lectured. Their living has come partly from subsistence farming and subsidence housekeeping. They have two children, five grandchildren, and four great-granddaughters.

Once in time, as Art Rowanberry would put it, a boy, the only child of a couple advanced in years, entered the world in the neighborhood of Port William, to be distinguished after his second day by the name of Delinthus Stackpole.

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His name did him no harm until he started to school, when some of his fellow boys took too much pleasure in repeating it while pointing at him with their forefingers, but the harm of that he overlooked. For teasing to be effective, the teasee must recognize that he is being teased. The young Delinthus Stackpole recognized no such thing. He went his way, not noticing, smiling evidently at something farther on. He was not teased.

His peers then, of course, undertook to molest him physically, which brought forth another revelation: he was not pushed. He was a mild, good-humored boy, big for his age. He was not over-tall but not short, not fat but wide and thick. The bulk of him may have suggested that he was soft, therefore pushable. But when his peers put their hands on him, they found him to be solid. He had a way of entirely filling up his clothes, sometimes overfilling them, for he grew fast. When the pushers pushed him, and he remained standing on his big feet exactly where he was when they started, only smiling upon them as if bestowing a kind interest in their activities, they permanently shortened his name to Stump.

At the age of fourteen, when he finished the eighth grade and emerged at last from school into the unobstructed world, he was as full-grown as he was going to get, and there was a lot of him.

From a time shortly after he learned to walk, he had served his father as a hand—a third hand, you might say, and sometimes as two extra feet. By the time he was out of school, his father, as he freely confessed, could not get along without him. He could do any of the work his father could do and, by then, more of it. For this was yet another revelation. His peers, who thought because he was so bulky he would be slow at work, were obliged to notice from somewhere behind him that he was fast, and remarkably nimble for one so large. He was not outworked, just as he was not teased and not pushed.

You might say that he was gifted in body, but as if to make up for that he was markedly deficient in speech. He was not mute or tongue-tied, but seemed perhaps constitutionally to be at a loss for words. He struggled to speak. Since he was by nature a person of good will, it was both natural and reasonable that when at all possible he spoke by smiling.

Or perhaps he simply was in the habit of not speaking. He was an only child, longed for and late come. Though he learned to talk eventually, mostly he did not need to, for his mother anticipated his needs and wants often before he knew he had them. When he accompanied and then helped his father at work, his father did the necessary talking, and the boy, being a person of good will and bodily gifted, learned to anticipate his father’s instructions. And the Stackpoles were somewhat isolated, for the long lane up Owl Hollow ended at their farm. Though his parents maintained the customary relations with their neighbors, until he started to school the young Delinthus lived most of his life in a society of three. And so when he came at last into the schoolroom to face one question after another asked directly of him, he may well have been astonished into speechlessness. At any rate, to say something, he had to begin by saying nothing.

As a boy among the other boys, once he gained their respect and became Stump, he got along very well. The rough games the boys played at recess and walking home after school required, really, nothing in the way of speech, and in the freedom of their play the other boys said so much, and at such volume, that the silence of only one of them was not noticeable. But several years had passed before the Stackpole boy said anything, if even as little as possible, to a girl.

After Stump began farming all day every day with his father, their relationship slowly altered in the way of nature. At first Stump worked for his father, and at last his father worked for him. This immemorial change was accomplished without any particular attention needing to be paid to it. Their farm’s business at the Independent Farmers Bank of Port William had long been conducted under the single name of Stackpole. Though by Stump’s time the Stackpole family was old in Port William, it had never been numerous. The male line in fact had stayed so thin that a Stackpole man had rarely needed a first name. Stump had needed to be Delinthus only to give him a sort of normality in the eyes of Professor Skelton, monarch of the school, who otherwise identified the boys by the length of the switch he needed for their instruction. And so when he came of age, Stump inscribed “Stackpole” on a piece of paper for Mr. Fawker, monarch of the Independent Farmers Bank of Port William, who looked upon him with favor, for Stackpole deposited more frequently than he withdrew.

In the way of nature, Stump’s father passed from the light and air down into his grave in the Stackpole plot on the hill at Port William. And then Stump and his mother were a society of two. In the way of immemorial tradition, Stump’s mother kept the house and Stump kept the farm, with passages back and forth as help was needed. As things had gone a while ago with Stump and his father, his mother eventually began to do less of the housekeeping and Stump more of it, until at last he was doing all of it. The old lady had gone for the last time to bed. And then for a while, with help from a neighbor’s dutiful boy, Winky Hample, and now and again the neighbors, Stump kept the farm, kept the house, and nursed his mother until she occupied her place beside his father on the hill at Port William.

And so Stump was left to make his way somewhat deliberately to appreciation of the present world’s first piece of good advice: “It is not good that the man should be alone.” Stump could boil and he could fry. He could wash thoroughly and iron approximately. He could, within five to fifteen minutes, thread a needle. Hittingly and missingly he could sew on a button. Only scandalously could he stitch or patch. He could not darn. Using, like his mother, the bunched and bound tail feathers of a tom turkey, he kept exposed surfaces free of dust. He did not mind dirt too much as long as it stayed on the floor.

It came to him at first from time to time, and then more often, that he needed a woman, a wife, a helpmeet for him. And of course he looked upon his need with dread and bewilderment, for he knew the ways of the world. To get a wife, he would have to look about, find a young woman more or less his own age, offer his attention to her, in various ways make himself agreeable to her, with the hope that she would consent to be his wife. But for that he knew himself to be a man far too shutmouthed. For far too long he had talked only when he had to. Now suddenly, for the first time in his life, he wanted to.

He saw he would have to practice. And so he began. When he was at work and knew himself to be safely alone, he began, speaking aloud, to tell himself what he was doing. Since he liked his work and knew what he was talking about, he found that the words soon began to come to him fairly freely, as if by their own will. He found himself listening to himself attentively, with an unaffected interest in what he had to say.

One day when he was plowing his tobacco with a rastus plow and the good mule he called Bud, he was so absorbed in his work and his ongoing commentary that he did not see his friend and sometime helper, Winky Hample, until Winky spoke. “Who you talking to, Stump?”

“Whoa!” Stump said.

He said, “Wellsir, Winky, I was talking to old Bud here. He misses old Buck. He gets lonesome working out here by himself. So I talk to him to kindly keep him company.”

And so there was some risk in the practice by which he was converting himself into a man who had something to say. But when he was caught, almost always by Winky Hample, he was surprised by how readily he improvised his excuses. “Why,” he said to himself, “you’re turning into a regular jaybird for conversation.”

That year went along and went along, and his confidence grew. At church on Sunday mornings he looked about him like the good stockman he was, sizing up the several still-available women of about his age and somewhat younger. He did not stare. His gaze went over them passingly, comparing them and taking sharp note of their qualities and attributes.

He owned a very presentable, everyday sort of saddle horse, old Bill, broke to harness and fit to draw a buggy. But when he cast his eye over the buggy that had served his parents, he saw that it would not do. It was visibly worn out, cracked and sagging, and speckled with sparrow droppings. So one morning he saddled Bill, rode him down to Hargrave, and drove him home in a new set of harness, hitched to a new buggy. Remembering his mother’s care for such 

things, he looked at his best clothes hanging in the closet, and he flinched somewhat before shutting the door. On his next trip to Hargrave he bought himself a new Sunday suit, black of course, and a black tie and a white shirt. He was getting ready, you see, looking ahead, looking around, foreseeing problems, anticipating needs. When he wondered how he and his old house might look to a young woman, he found the going hard. He asked himself a lot of questions beginning “How do you reckon . . .”

At church his eye fixed upon a young woman somewhat, in fact a good deal, younger than he was, whose last name he pronounced with great favor and perhaps with envy. Jones. She was Kizzie Jones, not bad looking at all. She looked alert. She carried her head not high, but up. She appeared to be good-humored, for he often saw her smiling or laughing. She had size. She looked strong. She had about her the glow of exuberant health that stockmen call “bloom.” But there was something else too, something he did not see, but felt. He felt it strongly. When he was feeling it, he felt his heart clinch like a fist, and it ached. He was as innocent of illness as a freshly laid egg. Nothing so far had prepared him for such an internal event. Several times he wondered if it could kill a man.

As I recall this story of Stump Stackpole out of the story of old Port William, which was told off and on a few sentences at a time in Port William’s unstopping conversation about itself, I am wondering how a young woman who was clearly such a prize had so far escaped the claim of a man more usual than Stump. Rather than speculate, I will tell what I know: that Kizzie was precisely the middle child in a generation of Joneses that, besides her, consisted of eight brothers, the older of whom had done at least their share in raising her, the younger of whom she had done more than her share in raising. The eight Jones brothers, by now down to the youngest, were not small or backward, were known as pretty good old boys but also as somewhat dangerous to mess with. The man who might have reached out his hand for Kizzie might have become overly fond of his hand.

Stump’s advantage, simply, was that it did not occur to him either to mess with the Jones brothers or to fear them. It was nonetheless with some agitation that he made his first direct approach to Kizzie. He wrote out his opening speech, memorized it, and put the piece of paper in his pocket in case of need.

On Sunday morning when church was over, he caught Kizzie’s attention by means of a little bow, which stopped her and caused her to look straight at him. He said, “Miss Kizzie, could I ask you, if you please, if I could come get you this afternoon and take you for a ride in my buggy?”

For a moment he felt himself pushed backward by the force of his question, but he held his ground. He received from Kizzie then, as it seemed to him, a very pretty smile.

She said, “Yes. Ask me.”

It took him a while to compose his next speech. “If I was to, would you?”

“Yes,” she said.

And so in about the middle of that afternoon, Stump drove old Bill and the new buggy up to the Joneses’ front gate. He tied Bill to a gate post, which was only a formality, for Bill, who was always willing to go, was always willing to stop. Stump shook himself, walked to the front door, and knocked.

When Mrs. Jones came to the door, she smiled at Stump and then called over her shoulder into the house, “Kizzie? Here he is.”

As he escorted Kizzie across the yard to the buggy, having decided not to take hold of her elbow, Stump tried to walk in a manner that was both deferential and protective. He knew however that, as a gentleman, he was expected to help the lady into the buggy, and he did then take hold of her arm just above the elbow. Fearing to grip too tightly, and perhaps also too eager to help, he caused his hand to slide up her arm until he felt with the backs of his fingers a fullness and softness from which he quickly slid his hand back down. “Scuse me,” he said. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

And Kizzie said, “I didn’t think you did.”

When Stump had untied Bill and come to his side of the buggy to get in, he was pleased to see that Kizzie had picked up the lines and so put herself in charge, to assure his safety as he was climbing in. When he was seated, she handed the lines to him, and he thanked her.

They drove upriver along the river road. The road then was only a pair of wagon tracks that forded the creeks and skirted the slues, passing through the fields of the broad bottomlands and now and again through patches of woodland. In the wintertime the road would be interrupted by mudholes and seasonal swamps. But by this time in the late spring the ground had solidified, and Bill drew the buggy easily and soundlessly along.

For a while Stump kept silent, allowing Kizzie the opportunity to be first to speak. This she declined. She seemed perfectly comfortable in riding along in silence, looking about at the country slowly revealing itself as they passed into it. Finally Stump thought somebody ought to be talking. Since it was left to him, he took up conversation as he had practiced it when he was by himself.

In a way perhaps charming, he told Kizzie about his crops and how they were faring. And then he told her about his cattle and his flock of sheep and his ways of caring for them. And then he told her about the twin calves born in early spring, both of whom had lived and were thriving. And then he told her about his foxhounds, going on at some length about the master hound he called old Cap. She listened, nodding and smiling, and her smiles, it seemed to him, were at times accompanied by too many teeth. At times he thought he could see jawteeth. Perhaps because of her interest in hearing more, she did not interrupt. He carried on bravely, conducting the conversation the best he could by himself, grateful to be sustained by his curiosity as to what he might say.

He did, however, wish that she would say something. His defense against the encroaching silence came to be afflicted with uneasiness as he enlarged his description of his farm and its contents, of his work, its results, and its prospects—thereby giving his listener a far better description of himself than he would have dared to offer her on purpose. But he began to be afraid that if he stopped talking nobody would talk. And so he talked, pursued by his fear of silence.

For some time the pressure he was feeling exteriorly had been accompanied by a pressure growing inwardly. Presently he was aware that the pressure within him was increasing faster than the pressure closing around him. It occurred to him that the trouble in his inwards might have been the result of the stress, entirely new to him, that had befallen him with his love for Kizzie Jones, or it might have been something he ate. As a stockman, anyhow, he readily identified his affliction as bloat or wind, and he knew it to be portentous of the worst sort of damage. And there was no use in speculating about the cause when the effect had become urgent.

He was dumbfounded at last. He began to sweat. The mere moisture became drops that ran down his face. He wiped them off his forehead with the back of his hand. He blew them off his upper lip and the end of his nose. He had never imagined that such a thing could happen to him and so of course he had never imagined anything that might be done about it. No doubt only desperation could have made him think of his pistol.

Among the several disciplines of his trade, he was a sheepman, a shepherd, ever mindful that his tender flock was at the mercy of an ignorant dog or a dog gone wrong. And so he was never far from a firearm of some kind, often his father’s forty-four-caliber revolver, a mighty weapon, which he happened to have brought along on that day’s fateful ride.

At the final, the ultimate, clinch of his crisis, he got out the pistol from under the seat, aimed it at the sky, drew back the hammer, pulled the trigger, and it misfired. After the puny snap of its hammer, the pistol’s silence partook of the silence of the morning before creation. But a great blast nevertheless had come forth, a rippit that, to Stump’s ear, seemed to tear the silence like a bolt of lightning—except that it did not have the rapidity of lightning. Grown exquisitely sensitive, he suffered its reverberation among the surrounding hills. He continued to stare, transfixed, at the place in the sky at which he was still aiming the pistol. Old Bill drew the buggy onward, and Stump rocked with its motion as rigidly as if cast in bronze.

And then he heard from somewhere nearby a most beautiful sound. It was the sound of a young woman freely laughing. He turned his head then and looked. He looked out through the glow of his face that was as hot and red as a stewed tomato. Still holding the pistol at arm’s length, pointing at the sky, he saw that Kizzie Jones was still there, looking back at him. She was the young woman who was laughing. She said, “Mr. Stackpole, what is the matter with your pistol?”

Stump heard from his own throat then a sound that he did not recognize, a sob perhaps, or maybe a strangle. But the next sound he heard was that of himself laughing.

After that, they were acquainted. After that, Nature and then the preacher laid the way clearly before them. The story of Stump and Kizzie Stackpole continued a long time on their good farm at the head of Owl Hollow and in the conversation of old Port William. They brought into the world a daughter and four sons, as healthy and hardy as themselves. They taught their children to work in support of their family and their farm. When the time came, by hard work and hard thrift, feeling that they could do no less, they sent their children away to school. The boys, owing to their homemade discipline and their schooling, found ready employment, for good money, in the city. Not waiting for success to find them at home, they went in search of it, and found it, to their satisfaction, in the world of the future, a long way from the old life they had lived as children. Only the daughter, Anna Lee, came home; married, I believe, one of the forefathers of Grover Gibbs; and cared for her parents to the end of their days.

It has been many a year since anybody in the country around Port William has answered to the name of Stackpole.

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“The Stackpole Legend” first appeared in The Threepenny Review. Copyright © 2024 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of the author.