Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Table of Contents

  Other Books About the Port William Membership

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Chapter 1 - The Story Continuing

  Chapter 2 - A Steadman

  Chapter 3 - The Future Shining Before Us

  Chapter 4 - Virgil

  Chapter 5 - What We Were

  Chapter 6 - One of the Feltners, a Member of Port William

  Chapter 7 - “Missing”

  Part 2

  Chapter 8 - Nathan

  Chapter 9 - Generosity

  Chapter 10 - Our Place

  Chapter 11 - The Membership

  Chapter 12 - Burley

  Chapter 13 - Ivy

  Chapter 14 - The Room of Love

  Chapter 15 - A Better Chance

  Chapter 16 - M. B. Coulter

  Chapter 17 - Caleb

  Chapter 18 - Margaret

  Chapter 19 - The Branches

  Part 3

  Chapter 20 - The Living

  Chapter 21 - Okinawa

  Chapter 22 - Next?

  Chapter 23 - Virge

  Chapter 24 - Given

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Other Books About the Port William Membership

  Andy Catlett

  Jayber Crow

  The Memory of Old Jack

  Nathan Coulter

  A Place on Earth

  Remembering

  That Distant Land

  A World Lost

  This book is given in gratitude

  to Tanya Amyx Berry

  Have drawn at last from time which takes away

  And taking leaves all things in their right place

  An image of forever

  One and whole.

  Edwin Muir

  Part I

  1

  The Story Continuing

  “I picked him up in my arms and I carried him home.”

  So Nathan would end the last of the stories of his childhood as he told it to our children.

  This was in 1940. Nathan was sixteen. He and Jarrat, his dad, his dad’s brother, Burley, and his grandpa Dave—the three of them had gone down into the river bottom, taking a team and wagon, to help a neighbor put up hay.

  It was hot weather, “hay weather,” the last of July. Dave Coulter, whom I too learned to call “Grandpa” though I never knew him, was eighty years old, no longer much use for work. While the younger men loaded and hauled in and unloaded the hay, Grandpa Coulter puttered about, or sat in the shade and slept, or carried water to the others when they needed a drink. Toward the middle of the afternoon he had one of the sick spells that he called “miseries,” and Jarrat told Nathan, “Walk home with him. Help him along. Take care of him.”

  The two of them went up the hill together, stopping often. When they had got almost home, Grandpa staggered and went down, and couldn’t be wakened. Nathan was a big boy by then, strong, and he gathered Grandpa into his arms and carried him the rest of the way up to the house where Grandma Coulter, whom I do remember a little, hurried to open the door and to make a place to lay him down.

  Nathan thought of that, I am pretty certain, as the last day of his boyhood. Past that day he told no more stories about himself. From then on he was in his own estimate and in his deeds a man who lived and worked as a man with his dad and his uncle Burley, expecting to go on working in the same place at the same work for the rest of his life. His older brother, Tom, had left home, but Nathan wanted to stay. He had not thought of going away or, yet, of marrying.

  But then, pretty soon, the war came. Tom and then Nathan were called into the army. Tom was killed as the fighting passed up through Italy. Andy Catlett went there years later and found his grave. It was in a valley not far outside of Florence, a field of white crosses, row after row, gathered in the quiet.

  Nathan didn’t “cross the waters,” as they used to say here, until the spring of 1945. And then he went pretty straight into the Battle of Okinawa, and lived, and was unhurt, and came home.

  But his stories about himself stopped at the death of Grandpa Coulter. He would tell our children the stories of his childhood, mostly of the things he and Tom had done. They did a lot of things, and saw and went through a lot of things, some funny and some sad enough.

  All I know of Tom Coulter I know of him as a boy in those stories Nathan told. Of Tom as a grown young man, as a soldier killed in the war far from Port William and forever gone, nobody spoke. I knew they didn’t speak of him as they last knew him, living and so near his death, because they couldn’t. And I understood why. They had got into the habit of silence because for too long after he died they couldn’t talk about him without weeping out loud. And so he lives on now in my mind as a boy in old stories told to children.

  Of Nathan himself, from the time when he and Tom roved about and played and worked together as boys, until after the war—when I turned aside from grief for the husband I had, who also was lost in the war, and finally could love Nathan and marry him—I know, beyond what I have learned to imagine, almost nothing.

  He was, anyhow, a quiet man who never had much extra to say. He had stories enough, about Burley and Big Ellis and Tol Proudfoot and others, mostly funny. But about himself, about the coming of the war and his time in it, though he would say something occasionally, not much, not often, he told no stories. If the subject came up, he was apt to say, “Ignorant boys, killing each other,” or something else about that short. And then, looking away, he would shake his head and say no more. Over the years I heard him say enough to know he didn’t like the power of some people to say whether other people will live or die. He didn’t like the idea of killing women and old men and children, or of destroying the world in order to kill people, or of great machines made only to kill people. What he did and what happened to him in the war, I don’t know. While he was alive I couldn’t ask him. After he was dead I learned what I could, and more than I could easily bear to know, about the Battle of Okinawa where he fought.

  His story after the war, and especially after 1948, I know because it is my story too. It is our story, for I lived it with him. It is the story of our place in our time: our farm of “150 acres more or less,” as the deed says, on the ridges and slopes above the creek known as Sand Ripple that runs down from Port William to the river. Nathan bought it in that year of 1948, hoping I would marry him, or in case I would, thinking he would need a place of his own to take me to.

  Our story is the story of our place: how we married and came here, moved into this old house and made it livable again while we lived in it; how we raised our children here, and worked and hoped and paid the mortgage, and made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and then almost forgotten; how we continued, making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war—Nathan seeing it, as I now think, as if from inside a fire; how we got old, and Nathan died, and I have remained on for yet a little while to see how such lives as ours and such a place may fare in a bad time.

  This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed. So close to the end now, what do I look forward to? “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” Some morning, I pray, I’ll have the good happiness of “the man who woke up dead,” who Burley Coulter used to tell about.

  This is my story, my giving of thanks.

  2

  A Steadman

  I was a Steadman from up in the ridges behind Hargrave. Dalton and Callie were my parents, and I was their only child. We lived on a rough farm that had belonged, since my gr
andfather’s death, to my grandmother. My father, her youngest son, farmed it as her tenant. We lived with my grandmother in her house, an old farmhouse of the usual kind: four rooms in front, divided upstairs and down by a wide hall, with another four rooms in an ell at the back. The farm had built the house but in those hard times was unable to maintain it. It was bare-boned and paintless, the weatherboard bleached and rain-stained. In places the stones of the foundation had sprawled from under the sills. The tall rooms were wonderfully cool in summer, but in the winter they were drafty and hard to heat. On windy days you could sit right by the stove and your back would be cold.

  My grandmother was Arvinia Steadman. I called her “Grandmam.” She was good to us, and all of us got along. She and my mother shared the housework, and they helped my father with the farmwork too when they were needed, like most farm women. We would all be at work together, sometimes with neighbors, in the plantbeds in the spring, in the harvest times of summer and fall, and in the stripping room in the winter. We worked hard, before day to after dark, and I helped and had my own jobs to do from the time I was five or six years old. The times were hard, and they got worse. I was seven when the Depression hit and eight in the terribly dry summer of 1930 when we drove the stock two miles to water.

  It was a hard time, and most people now, if they could even imagine it, would say we were living a hard life. But there was understanding among us, we were never hungry, and we had good neighbors. I was mostly happy, or I certainly thought I was, until I was twelve years old.

  The year I was twelve my mother died. She took the flu and then pneumonia, and then, almost before we could think that she might die, she was dead. By her grave, when we brought her there, there was a heap of snow on one side and a heap of dirt on the other.

  And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable. We went on, the three of us remaining, as we had to do. In all the practical ways we managed fine. Grandmam was still a vigorous woman, as she would be for years yet. My father, though seriously damaged by his loss for a while at least, was capable and a master of making do. I was big enough then to do a woman’s part, and I did it. But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

  After about a year my father married again. That, it turned out, was not the best solution to his problem, and it took me from loss and grief into trouble of another kind. He married Ivy Crutchlow, a widow from our neighborhood. There is no use in dwelling on old ills, and I’m long past my grudge, but I have to say that she was not a good wife to my father, and she lived up to the bad reputation of stepmothers. The problem between Ivy and me was that she had two boys, Elvin and Allen, two and three years younger than I was, who were the stars in her crown, as she liked to tell you. They were all she had lived for since the death of their father, so it is understandable that she loved them entirely and didn’t have any affection left over for me. She saw me as competition for them and, since we had little enough to spare of anything, she was always needing to take their side. She was always in a panic to see that they got enough, or their share, or, if she could work it, the best. If my grades in school were better than theirs, which they were, she would act as if I had got more than my share of a limited supply of good grades. Whatever she gave them seemed to her to be something she took away from me, even when it wasn’t. And she couldn’t hide her pleasure in such victories, even when she knew I didn’t want whatever she had given them.

  What was worse was that Elvin and Allen, set at odds with me already by their mother’s preference, went about snooping and spying on me with a gleeful dirty-mindedness that I hated. I never had hated anybody before, but to find them creeping around after I came out of the privy, or giggling at the mere sight of my underwear on the clothesline, made me want to kill them.

  My father, I suppose, had too much trouble of his own to be much aware of mine. His marriage to Ivy was as big a mistake for him as it was for me, and I think he found it out pretty quick. He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them. He got along with Elvin and Allen by joking and cutting up with them. He called them Scissor Lips and Bigwig. Though their mother spoiled them and did everything for them, they paid no attention to her at all, but they minded my father and did the work he set for them to do. Still, it was a divided, unhappy household we had then, and I know he felt it.

  “She’s going to prove out to be righter than everybody in this world, and she’ll be the only one in Heaven—except, I reckon, for Elvin and Allen.” That was the only comment my father ever made to me about Ivy. Mostly he dealt with her too by joking, and by staying out of the house as much as he could. Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

  The worst I saw of it was the night my father joined the church. There was a revival, and we were going every night to the white church that sat with the graveyard behind it at the edge of our little crossroads settlement of Shagbark.

  It was good to sit there with everybody in the lighted church and to sing and listen to the preaching while the katydids cried in the warm night beyond the opened windows. What my father had done to be particularly repentant of, I don’t know. He had done something.

  The sermon was over and we were singing,Just as I am, without one plea . . .

  As soon as I saw that my father had stepped out into the aisle and started down to where the preacher stood, I knew it had something to do with Ivy. They had quarreled, maybe. He was offering himself to God as an offering to Ivy. Or having proved in some way unacceptable to Ivy, he was hoping to be acceptable to God.

  As the singing went on, he stood in front of us all with tears shining on his face. After the final prayer, when the people went to speak to him and shake his hand, Ivy ought to have gone too. Grandmam went and I went, but Ivy didn’t go.

  The trouble was that by dividing herself from him, Ivy somehow divided him from Grandmam and me. And what must have been clear enough to the two of them was forever a mystery to us. I think the house became a strange place to everybody. It surely did become strange to me, and my father too became strange to me. From the time he brought Ivy and her boys home with him, I owed everything, simply everything, to Grandmam.

  In the old arrangement, my parents had slept in the living room, where the big heating stove stood in the winter. My father slept there still after my mother died, and that was where he and Ivy would sleep. My room was the one above, warmed by hot air rising up from the stove through a register in the floor. Grandmam slept on a cot in the big kitchen at the back of the ell, where she had the warmth, when she needed it, of the cooking stove, and where she kept her rocking chair and her big bureau with its drawers holding her few good clothes and her old clothes and the things she saved because they might be needed.

  She had moved herself into the kitchen when my father married my mother. She wanted, as she said, to be out of the way. She wanted my mother to have a free hand with the rest of the house. And in fact she did keep out of the way, and she did give my mother, and then Ivy, a free hand with the rest of the house. Still, by making her last stand in the kitchen, she kept herself in the center of things. In the kitchen she was in charge. Other people who worked in that kitchen worked for her. By moving her whole life there, she had, so to speak, faced away from the rest of the house, but from the kitchen she still oversaw the garden, the cellar, the smokehouse, the henhouse, the barn lots and the barns, and all the comings and goings between barns and fields.

  She was a good cook, but she also did the main work that kept us eating. She made the garden, and all we didn’t eat fresh she preserved and stored for the winter. She took care of the hens and the turkeys. She milked two cows. My father was in charge of the meat hogs, but Grandmam was the authority and head worker at the butchering and sausage making and lard rendering and the curing of the meat. In the summers she, and I with her, roamed the fencerows and woods edges and hollo
ws to pick wild berries for pies and jam. She was always busy. She never backed off from anything because it was hard. She washed and ironed, made soap, sewed and patched and darned. Every Saturday she carried a basket of eggs and a bucket of cream to the store at Shagbark. Though she never made an issue of being the landlady, or needed to, her word on everything having to do with the farm was final. My father understood that, and Ivy didn’t change it.

  Grandmam was still proud of the narrowness of her waist when she was a young woman. When she married, she said, her waist had been so small that my grandfather could almost encircle it with his two hands. Now, after all her years of bearing and mothering and hard work, she had grown thick and slow, and she remembered her lost suppleness and beauty with affection but without grief. She didn’t grieve over herself. Looking me up and down as I began to grow toward womanhood, she would say, “Do you know your old grandmam was like you once?” And she would smile, knowing I didn’t know it even though she had told me.

  She would do a man’s work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time, she wore them long. The girls of her day, I think, must have been like well-wrapped gifts, to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. “Well! What’s this?”

  Though times were hard and she was poor, Grandmam was a respectable woman, and she knew she was. When there was a reason for it, she could make herself look respectable. But mostly, when she was at home and at work, she wore clothes that many a woman, even then, would have thrown away. Her “everyday” black dresses were faded by the sun and lye soap, and they would be patched and tattery and worn out of shape. For cold weather she had an overcoat that must have been as old as she was, but it was, she said, “still as good as new.” In any weather she was apt to be wearing a leftover pair of my grandfather’s shoes that were too big. She never gave up on her clothes until they were entirely worn out, and then she ripped them up, saving the buttons, and wore them out as rags.