The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership. San Francisco: North Point , 1986.

Also collected in That Distant Land: The Collected Stories. Washington, D. C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

From the dust jacket: 

When the "wayward" Burley Coulter quotes St. Paul in an argument with his friend and kinsman, the lawyer Wheeler Catlett, he states the theme of his own understanding of his own story and of Wendell Berry's new book as well: "The way we are," he says, "we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't."

The concept of membership, of individuals as parts of a community, each affecting all the others, lies at the heart of this sequence of stories set in Port William, Kentucky, and its surroundings-a setting that is taking its place alongside Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Winesburg, Ohio, and Paterson, New Jersey, as one of our most distinctive and recognizable literary locales.

In his novels Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, and The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry has traced the fortunes of this farming community from the depression years through the war period and into the fifties. The stories in THE WILD BIRDS span a longer time-from I930 to I967- but they are tied together by the presence of Wheeler Catlett.

Wheeler is a thoughtful, meditative man, though capable of firm action when it is called for. He is a bridge between country and town, a man with a vision born of his farming youth, a "practical imagination," of whom his son Andy says "Even when we failed them, his imaginings remained with us, so that we inherited from him early his abounding sense of the possibilities of this countryside Iying around our town of Port William."

In the first story, "Thicker Than Liquor," we meet Wheeler's Uncle Peach, an alcoholic black sheep who falls into Wheeler's care and teaches him a lesson of acceptance. "Where Did They Go?" tells of Andy Catlett's fall from sexual innocence during tobacco planting. "It Wasn't Me" decides the future of Old Jack's farm, as Wheeler comes to the aid of the tenant farmers Elton and Mary Penn. In "The Boundary" and "That Distant Land," Wheeler's father-in-law, Mat Felmer, cultivates a serene strength in the decline of his final summer. Finally, "The Wild Birds" shows Wheeler faced with Burley Coulter's resolve to leave his farm to an until then unacknowledged son.

These are stories of realization and epiphany. The community of Port William - its " membership " - holds within it the secrets of its past, and its members are coming to know where the good resides within them. We sense in this now declining country the seeds of its renewal. Readers of Wendell Berry's fiction will be grateful to Wheeler Catlett for bringing the community closer to the beauty of the promise it holds for us all.

Jacket illustration Laurie Anderson. 146 pages.

Contents:

Thicker Than Liquor
Where Did They Go?
It Wasn't Me
The Boundary
That Distant Land
The Wild Birds. 

First Sentence:

When the phone rang, Wheeler Catlett was thinking about his future.