Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  It is entirely clear to me now. We were coming together into the presence of something good that was possible in this world. I have to see it now as a sad hope, because we were able to use up so little of it, but it was no less a beautiful one.

  It came to be that when we would sit in one of those lovely, overlooking places, as if we watched a time and a life approaching that in fact was never going to reach us, Virgil would draw me over to him and keep his arm around me as we talked or did not talk. And still he wasn’t acting really as my lover. It just seemed that, as we waited together for the coming of this life, it had become wrong to sit apart.

  I forget exactly when it was. The trees had leafed out. Warm weather had come. It was early summer, whatever the calendar may have said. We drove up the Ohio a few miles and turned into an old road along an embankment that ended where a bridge had washed out. Below us where we stopped was a low patch of bottomland planted in corn. The little field was nearly surrounded by the trees along the road embankment and the creek and the river.

  It was evening, after supper. The sun was already down. We sat without talking in the almost perfect quiet and watched it get dark.

  It got dark. The fireflies began to rise up from the ground, shining their little lights. By then you couldn’t see what they were rising up from. The darkness over that little field could have been a thousand miles deep. Above us was the darkness and the stars, and below us the darkness of the field and the slow glittering of the fireflies, and the darkness around us.

  We were sitting close. And then maybe he forgot himself, or maybe the new being that we together had been becoming moved him past the limit he had set for himself, but in the most lovely, gentle way he did finally lay his open hand on my thigh.

  For a minute I didn’t have any words at all. And then his name came to me, and I said, “Virgil.” And then I said, “Wait. Let’s don’t and say we did.”

  He laughed and said, “Let’s do and say we didn’t.”

  But he took his hand away, and we sat in the silence again, looking at the flickering lights out in the dark.

  And then he said, “Hannah, listen. What if I was to marry you?”

  The life we had imagined and wanted seemed close to us. Sitting with Virgil’s arm around me, I felt all enclosed in the warm dark and lost to everything that had happened to me so far. Virgil was strong and it made me strengthless. I didn’t want to be weak, or strong either. I wanted whatever this was going to lead to. And then I laughed because the place where his hand had been felt cold and I wanted to cry. I said, “If you would I surely would be obliged.” I barely had the breath to say it.

  He spoke to me then as if I were even younger than I was, as if not sure that I could understand him. “I’ve been telling you I love you a long time,” he said, “in a way you could take as a joke if you wanted to. But I meant it. What you’ve got to tell me now is if maybe you might love me a little bit. It doesn’t have to be a lot right now.”

  I didn’t cry, but I couldn’t keep my voice from quivering. I said, “Oh, I do. And not a little bit, either.”

  I heard myself say that. It gave me a sort of shock, and a cooler, quieter feeling came over me. The things we had said landed me hard all of a sudden on the question of who I was and what I had to offer. I was pretty, and desirable too—how could I not have known that? But I had nothing. I didn’t even own a suitcase.

  I scooted away from him so I could face him, though I could hardly see him. I said, “I do love you, Virgil. Of course I do. But there are problems with this, you know.”

  “What?” he said.

  And I said, “What will Miss Ora think? What will your parents think? What will Bess and Wheeler think? What will you think in ten years? What are all of you going to think of me? You all are prosperous people, with a place in the world, and I don’t have anything. Listen! I don’t have anything to offer but what’s walking around in my clothes.”

  He started laughing. “That’s what I’ve got in mind,” he said. He gave me an actual kiss then, though he laughed all the way through it, and said, “You let me worry,” and took me home.

  I didn’t know what he was going to do. What he did was he told his parents at breakfast the next morning, “I’m going to get married.”

  His mother said, “To Hannah?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  He told me that much. What else may have been said, he didn’t tell me. Did they object? I would have, I think. When I asked Virgil, he said, “No.” He was, after all, twenty-six years old, so maybe they didn’t.

  Miss Ora, I knew, would have objections, but the others must have thought of that. When I was walking home from work that afternoon, I saw Mr. and Mrs. Feltner in their car backing out of Miss Ora’s driveway. They smiled and waved to me and went on.

  When I went into the house Miss Ora was standing in the hall, just inside the door. She surprised me. I said, “Oh, hello, Miss Ora!”

  She smiled and corrected me. “Auntie,” she said, and opened her arms.

  And so we had the world’s permission, you might say, to love each other and to be together. I felt free. I could put my arms around Virgil then and feel that it was rightly done.

  When you are old you can look back and see yourself when you were young. It is almost like looking down from Heaven. And you see yourself as a young woman, just a big girl really, half awake to the world. You see yourself happy, holding in your arms a good, decent, gentle, beloved young man with the blood keen in his veins, who before long is going to disappear, just disappear, into a storm of hate and flying metal and fire. And you don’t know it.

  5

  What We Were

  Virgil told his parents, “Soon.”

  But then he told me, “Not too soon. Let it soak in a while.”

  We began to talk, just between ourselves, about what day it would be, but we weren’t hurrying.

  We were free now, and we saw each other more often. Virgil would quit work early on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons if he could and drive down to Hargrave. We would get something to eat, go to a movie maybe, take one of our drives, stop a while at one of Virgil’s pretty places for a little “sloodepooping,” as he called it, though he treated me with the strictest honor, according to the old rules. Since by then maybe I couldn’t have told him no, it moves me now to remember how careful he was of me. I think it was because he was so much older that he could take responsibility for my youth and greenness and shelter me even from himself. We talked and talked, making plans, foreseeing a life together, and in everything celebrating a delight that was new to me and, I am sure, to him. He had a way of looking at me and laughing, just because he was full of pleasure, and that would make me laugh.

  “Oh, I’ve entirely lost my mind,” he said. “I can’t remember ever having one.” And he hugged me and laughed.

  I had the scary duty of taking Virgil to meet my family, not knowing what he would think of them or what they and he would have to say to one another. But Virgil was gracious and respectful to Grandmam, polite to my father, courtly to Ivy, friendly to Elvin and Allen. It went all right.

  Maybe it was being there with Virgil that made the old place look poorer to me than ever, and I said as we drove away, “Well, it’s not very grand, is it?”

  And Virgil said, “Don’t think of it. Your grandmother makes it lovely.”

  The place I associate most with the time of our courtship is that intermingling garden that lay behind Miss Ora’s house. If the weather was fine we often walked there. Sometimes we spent whole Sunday afternoons there, wandering about, watching the boats on the river, sitting and talking in the gazebo or on the grass. I would look sometimes at Virgil, knowing that he had been looking at me, and he would be laughing quietly with that pleasure I knew in him, and there would be tears in his eyes.

  And gradually I came to know what he had meant when he said, “Let it soak in.”

  It needed to soak i
nto the family, but it needed to soak into us too, and especially it needed to soak into me.

  Like maybe any young woman of that time, I had thought of marriage as promises to be kept until death, as having a house, living together, working together, sleeping together, raising a family. But Virgil’s and my marriage was going to have to be more than that. It was going to have to be part of a place already decided for it, and part of a story begun long ago and going on.

  The Feltner place had been in that family a long time—since the first white people settled here. Virgil had taken his place, after his father, in the line of those who were gone and those who were to come. It was something I needed to get into my mind. The love he bore to me was his own, but also it was a love that had been borne to him, by people he knew, people I now knew, people he loved. That, I think, was what put tears in his eyes when he looked at me.

  He must have wondered if I would love those people too.

  Well, as it turned out, I did. And I would know them as he would never know them, for longer than he knew them. I knew them old, in their final years and days. I know them dead.

  One Sunday afternoon Virgil turned away from the Ohio and we drove up what he called “our river.” At the top of the Port William hill, he opened a gate and we drove back through the Feltner land to a neat farmstead—barns, a corn crib, lots, sorting pens, a loading chute—with a pair of tall stone chimneys standing down the slope of the ridge not far away. The log house that had stood between the chimneys, fallen to ruin and torn down, was the one where the old Feltners had lived, the first ones.

  This was what the living Feltners called “the far place.” It was where Virgil kept his cattle. We left the car and walked through two more gates to the chimneys. A shower that morning had cleared the air, and it was a lovely bright afternoon. From what must have been the old front yard, the valley seemed to open almost at our feet. We could see a long way up the river, and downriver nearly to the lock above Hargrave.

  Virgil reached toward it with his hand open. “Look.”

  I said, “Oh, yes! You can see the whole world.”

  “Almost,” he said. “Some of the best of it, anyway.”

  We stood and looked. The river ran below us, its double row of shore trees swinging in against the hill on our side, leaving a wide bottomland on the other. It needed a long look because you had to think of how old it was, and of how many voices had spoken and hushed again beside it.

  And then Virgil took my hand. He said, “It’s too good a day not to be here for a while.”

  We went to the westward chimney and sat in the shade on the old hearthstones. The ghost of the house that had been there surrounded us. All that was left of it were the two chimneys, a pile of the old foundation stones, and the well top with a rusty pump lying beside it.

  Virgil said, “They picked a fine place, didn’t they?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “God’s plenty to look at. Cool and breezy in the summertime.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and cold and drafty in the wintertime.”

  He grinned and nodded, looking off. He knew I knew what I was talking about.

  “The wind lifted the rugs off the floor, I expect. But we’ve got to build a house somewhere, and we could make it tight.”

  I said, “Here?”

  “It’s a possibility, maybe. Maybe we could even use the old hearths and chimneys.” He was watching me. “That’s just a thought I had. It’s a thought you could change. You’ve changed my thoughts a plenty already.”

  “Here would be lovely,” I said. “Anywhere would be lovely.”

  He was watching me, still grinning, but he was thinking too. He was serious. “One advantage would be the old well. It’s still a good one, I think. They say it was never dry.”

  He went to the well and lifted away the rocks and boards that covered the opening.

  “Come look.”

  We lay on our stomachs and looked in, blind at first after the sunlight, and then gradually seeing. The well wasn’t wide, but it went a long way down. A stone wall went to the bedrock, beautiful as that old work almost always is, and below that the well opened through layer after layer of time to a flat disk of light where we saw our two faces looking back up at us right out of the innards of the world.

  As it turned out, that was the last time we ever spoke of building a house there between the two original hearths. War was coming.

  We got married in the fall of 1941, after the crops were harvested. We gave our promise of faithfulness until death in a preacher’s living room in Hargrave. Bess and Wheeler Catlett stood up with us. There were just the four of us and the preacher and his wife. We made a little wedding trip by train to Chicago, where neither of us had ever been. We felt rather small amidst the noise and gladder than we admitted to be going home when the time came.

  Our home—for the time being, as we said—was Virgil’s old room at the Feltners’. We had agreed with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, almost as soon as we had spoken of marriage, that we would live with them until we could build for ourselves. They made us welcome. We weren’t crowded, goodness knows. Ten rooms were more than plenty for Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, Virgil and me, and Mrs. Feltner’s younger brother, Ernest Finley, who slept in the room over the kitchen, as I had done at home. But once there, we thought no further about building a house. War and rumors of war made a kind of pressure against the future or any talk of plans. And then, after Pearl Harbor, our voices sounded different to us, as voices do in a house after an outside door has blown open.

  It was the Christmas season, and we made the most of it. Virgil and I cut a cedar tree that filled a corner of the parlor, reached to the ceiling, and gave its fragrance to the whole room. We hung its branches with ornaments and lights, and wrapped our presents and put them underneath. One evening Virgil called up the Catlett children, pretending to be Santa Claus, and wound them up so that Bess and Wheeler nearly never got them to bed. We cooked for a week—Nettie Banion, the Feltners’ cook, and Mrs. Feltner and I. We made cookies and candy, some for ourselves, some to give away. We made a fruit cake, a pecan cake, and a jam cake. Mr. Feltner went to the smokehouse and brought in an old ham, which we boiled and then baked. We made criss-crosses in the fat on top, finished it off with a glaze, and then put one clove exactly in the center of each square. We talked no end, of course, and joked and laughed. And I couldn’t help going often to the pantry to look at what we had done and admire it, for these Christmas doings ran far ahead of any I had known before.

  Each of us knew that the others were dealing nearly all the time with the thought of the war, but that thought we kept in the secret quiet of our own minds. Maybe we were thinking too of the sky opening over the shepherds who were abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks, and the light of Heaven falling over them, and the angel announcing peace. I was thinking of that, and also of the sufferers in the Bethlehem stable, as I never had before. There was an ache that from time to time seemed to fall entirely through me like a misting rain. The war was a bodily presence. It was in all of us, and nobody said a word.

  Virgil and I brought Grandmam over from Shagbark on Christmas Eve. She was wearing her Sunday black and her silver earrings and broach. To keep from embarrassing me, as I understood, she had bought a nice winter coat and a little suitcase. She had presents for the Feltners and for Virgil and me in a shopping bag that she refused to let Virgil carry. I had worried that she would feel out of place at the Feltners, but I need not have. Mr. and Mrs. Feltner were at the door to welcome her, and she thanked them with honest pleasure and with grace.

  On Christmas morning Nettie Banion’s mother-in-law, Aunt Fanny, came up to the house with Nettie to resume for the day her old command of the kitchen. Joe Banion soon followed them under Aunt Fanny’s orders to be on hand if needed.

  And then the others came. Bess and Wheeler were first. Their boys flew through the front door, leaving it open, waving two new pearl-handled cap pistols apiece, followed
by their little sisters with their Christmas dolls, followed by Bess and Wheeler with their arms full of wrapped presents. We all gathered around, smiling and talking and hugging and laughing. The boys were noisy as a crowd until Virgil said, “Now, Andy and Henry, you remember our rule—I get half of what you get, and you get half of what I get.” And then they got noisier, Henry offering Virgil one of his pistols, Andy backing up to keep both of his. And then all three of them went to the kitchen to smell the cooking and show their pistols to Nettie and Aunt Fanny.

  Hearing the commotion, Ernest Finley came down from his room. Ernest had been wounded in the First World War and walked on crutches. He was a woodworker and a carpenter, a thoughtful, quiet-speaking man who usually worked alone. The Catlett boys loved him because of his work and his tools and his neat shop and the long bedtime stories he told them when they came to visit.

  Miss Ora came, still alert to see that I called her “Auntie,” with Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Homer Lord, who had come down to Hargrave the day before from Indianapolis. The Lords weren’t kin to the Feltners at all, except that Aunt Lizzie and Mrs. Feltner had been best friends when they were girls—which, Aunt Lizzie said, was as close kin as you could get.

  And then Virgil and I and the boys with their pistols drove out the Bird’s Branch road to Uncle Jack Beechum’s place—where he had been “batching it,” as he said, since the death of his wife—and brought him to our house. He was the much younger brother of Mr. Feltner’s mother, Nancy Beechum Feltner. Mr. Feltner’s father, Ben, had been a father and a friend to Uncle Jack, who now was in a way the head of the family, though he never claimed such authority. Everybody looked up to him and loved him and, as sometimes was necessary, put up with him.