The Hurt Man

It is the late summer of 1888, and the town of Port William is a dangerous place for a child to be wandering around. Yet that is exactly what five-year-old Mat Feltner does. Danger lurks behind every corner, horses in the road, the occasional droves of animals, and plenty of anger fuelled fistfights inside the saloons or in the street. Death is something Mat Feltner is aware of, something most boys his age nowadays, thankfully, are not. He knows his three siblings are buried in the town’s graveyard. The short story “The Hurt Man” by Wendell Berry revolves around the themes death and grief, and revolves around how Mat comes to not only be aware of the two things, but to comprehend them.
The short story takes place in the town of Port William and the year is 1888, as previously mentioned. It is a small town, built along a road that used to be no more than a buffalo trace. In one end of the town is a school, in the other a graveyard. There are a couple of saloons, a church, a blacksmith, a bank, a hotel and some stores, and a dozen miles by river to the nearest courthouse. The characteristics such as the saloons, the fact that the city’s road used to be a buffalo trace, and the lack of law, as well as the names of the characters, point towards the town of Port William being an American frontier town.
Anger rules the town and violence is at a high rate, especially in this particular town because there is no one to uphold the law. “And in Port William, a dozen miles by river from the courthouse and the rule of the law, anger had a license that it might not have had in another place. Sometimes violence would break out in one of the saloons or the road.”. Violence therefor has a special place in the town, and so does death. Mat’s three siblings are dead, and his mother wears a black dress. There are more people buried in the graveyard, than there are living in the town. “(…) by the headstones up in the graveyard, which was even then more populous then the town.”.
Mat is the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Feltner that is still alive and well. He is described as an unexpected blessing, and being there only son he is both cherished and loved. “Mat had come late into the lives of Nancy and Ben Feltner, after the deaths of their other children, and he had come unexpectedly, ‘a blessing’.”. Despite him being an only child, an adored only child, his mother is not over protective of her son as one might expect. No, she knows that her child must experience the risks of the world first hand, just like her other children. “She knew that the world was risky and that she must risk her surviving child to it as she had done with the others (…)”. Therefor Mat was able to explore the town, and the unavoidable dangers connected to it. The knowledge of his dead siblings was not kept for him in order to protect him, neither was the violence in the town.

One day all this changed, Mat’s childlike view of the world changed. All because of the hurt man, as the title gives away. An otherwise unsurprising scenario turns into something strange for Mat. “They were not surprised even when a bloody man broke out of the crowd and began running fast up the street towards them (…)”. What surprised him was that his mother helped the man who had been cut up so badly. Suddenly Mat experiences what emotions his mother feels because the man has been hurt so badly. “What he saw in her face would remain with him forever. It was pity, but it was more than that. It was a hurt love that seemed to include entirely the hurt man.”. He experiences the tenderness his mother shows the man, and even though she always wears the black dress of mourning, he only now for the first time sees his mother mourning, and it overwhelms him. “To him then it was as though she leaned in the black of her mourning over the whole hurt world itself, touching its wounds with her tenderness, in her sorrow.” . Before he only knew that violence was often accompanied by blood, now he realises and experiences through his mother, the pain and sorrow it can cause other people. The things that were incomprehensible to Mat before, such as death, subconsciously became clear to him. He understood his mother’s grief, and he realised something that to us who have already made the same realisation sounds foolish, that the dead have been alive. His brother and his sisters and all the other people buried in the graveyard were alive like him, but are now dead. “Loss came into his mind then, and he knew what he was years away from telling, even from thinking: that his mother’s grief was real; that her children in their graves once had been alive; that everybody lying under the grass up in the graveyard once had been alive (…).. He realises that death is inevitable and everybody dies.
He had experienced his first loss by his mother’s side, and he knew that more losses would come, to him and to those he cared about. He now had an understanding of mortality and death. And he took some sort of comfort in knowing that he would not be surprised by the sad facts of reality more than once.

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