Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  I remember the Feltners’ grief and my own when Joe died, and again when Nettie and Aunt Fanny went away, and again when Mr. and Mrs. Feltner visited them in their apartment in Cincinnati and found them there but not at home there, and not to be at home again in this world.

  If they were going to be at home anywhere it would have had to be in Port William. The Banions belonged to the Feltner place by the same history as the Feltners, going back a hundred and fifty years. The two families belonged to each other. The Banions had been faithful to the place, and their work had gone into it, year after year, generation after generation. The Feltners had been faithful in return, and had favored them beyond the custom. The two families had the same history, they remembered the same things, they knew the same things, there was affection and loyalty between them, and love. And yet the story is incomplete. Its ending was not satisfactory. Nettie and Aunt Fanny had too little to take with them when they left. It was too easy for them to leave. And yet when they left, they were leaving home.

  We learned these things by our grief. By our loss too.

  My children were born into that story, and into the membership that the story is about, and into the place that was home to the membership, and home to them too as long as they wanted such a home. We brought them up, teaching them as well as we could the things the place would require them to know if they stayed.

  And yet, like Nettie and Aunt Fanny, they too chose to go.

  12

  Burley

  When she was about four years old, Little Margaret sincerely believed that when she grew up she was going to marry Burley Coulter. She was not the first young woman to have thought of such a thing.

  He would have been in his mid-fifties then and was still an attractive man, as he would continue to be for a long time. If you were a woman and inclined to like him, you would have been more or less in love with him.

  Once, after Lyda and Danny Branch had married and come to live with Burley, and he had made them at home with him and himself with them, I asked Lyda, “Have you ever thought what it would have been like to be in love with him when he was young?” And Lyda said, “Oh! Wouldn’t he have been an armful?”

  When he was young, Burley was as wild as you please. He caused a lot of trouble for himself and for other people. He had the gift of construing the trouble into a joke. The joke was almost always on himself, and was a good joke, and so the people who cared about him and were troubled by him almost always forgave him. And so he managed to be wild without being more than temporarily disowned by the family or the neighbors. To use his word, he continued to be a member because they wanted him to be. To use another of his words, he was a wayward member. Later, he was a member because he wanted to be.

  What changed him, I think, was the death of his sister-in-law. After that, the elder Coulters took Tom and Nathan to raise. A certain responsibility for the boys fell to Burley then. He had not asked for any such responsibility, but he accepted it when it came, and it made him responsible. It made him tender too. He did his part in bringing up his brother’s sons, and when his own son, Danny Branch, came along, he did his part for him.

  But Burley didn’t change completely. He remained always capable of disappearing off into the woods with his hounds, sometimes for days at a time. Until he was old, he could be attracted into what he and his friend Jayber Crow called “celebrations.” He didn’t think of marrying Danny’s mother until too late. All the same, he was good, he was funny, and as much as anybody I ever knew he was interesting.

  I would ask him to do something, and he would give me a look that managed to be mocking, respectful, tender, loving, and flirtatious all at once. He would say, “Yes, mam, honey.”

  Or when a gang of us would be at work in the barn or the stripping room, he would preach the membership, mocking a certain kind of preacher, yet meaning every word he said:

  “Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, we are members one of another. The difference, beloved, ain’t in who is and who’s not, but in who knows it and who don’t. Oh, my friends, there ain’t no nonmembers, living nor dead nor yet to come. Do you know it? Or do you don’t? A man is a member of a woman and a worm. A woman is a member of a man and a mole. Oh, beloved, it’s all one piece of work.”

  “Many hands make light work,” Art Rowanberry used to say, and that is right, up to a point. And there is a certain kind of talk that lightens work too. Burley was a master of that. When the work was hard or hot or miserable, or when we were suffering our weariness at the end of a long day, we would hear him singing out: “It’s root, hog, or die, boys! I was kicked out of Hell for playing in the ashes! All I want is a good singleline mule and a long row!”

  If we were hard at it in the hog killing, he would shout, “Thirty years in a slaughter house and never cut a gut!”

  Burley, carrying on. He was faithful, not swift. He would be at the tail end of a crew working across a field, and you would hear him holler, mocking himself, “Follow me, boys! You’ll wear diamonds!”

  Sometimes as we worked together he would tell stories. That would usually be when there were children around, but all of us would listen.

  He told the story of the big picnic that we never had but were always going to have “one of these days.”

  He told of the time when he was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, which he never was, but the idea had caught his fancy, and he made us imagine him driving a team of six spirited black horses with plumes on their headstalls, drawing a wagon loaded with pretty women.

  He told of the time he went fishing and the mosquitoes were so big and fierce that he had to take shelter under a lard kettle, and the mosquitoes’ beaks were so tough and sharp that they pierced the iron and came through, and he picked up his hammer and clenched their beaks, and the mosquitoes flew off with his kettle.

  Jarrat or Nathan always said, “How come you took a lard kettle and a hammer with you when you went fishing?”

  And Burley always said, “Some of you fellows don’t know anything. I been farther around the frying pan looking for the handle, than you ever been away from home.”

  He told of the night he went to the fair at Hargrave: “I got to feeling pretty good, and I went to this gypsy to get my fortune told. I sat down at her table and shoved her over a quarter. She looked me right straight in the eye and shoved my quarter back. She said, ‘I can’t tell your fortune. You haven’t got anything in your mind.’ She was right, too. An honest woman. My head was as empty as a gourd.”

  He told about going courting one night in a buggy. It was a dark night. It was a weedy place. Backing up to turn around, he backed the buggy onto a sleeping cow, who stood up and turned the buggy over.

  Nathan would ask him, “What were you doing courting in a buggy in a pasture?”

  And Burley would say, “Now you’re wanting to know facts.”

  He told about the man who bored a hole in the bottom of his boat to let the water out.

  He told about the man who woke up dead.

  Little Margaret, and the boys when they came along, were always after him for stories. “Uncle Burley, tell us a story. Tell us a story, Uncle Burley.” They told “Uncle Burley stories” to each other. The boys both went through times when they wanted to be “just like Uncle Burley” when they grew up.

  And so he was the best kind of uncle. The children took a lot of pleasure in him, and maybe for that reason he could require them to take him seriously when he was serious. He could settle them down or talk sense to them or get work out of them sometimes when Nathan and I couldn’t. I remember a day when Mattie was about fifteen and we were in the tobacco cutting. We had several loads to unload before we could quit. The day had got long, and it was going to get longer. It was hot and close, threatening rain, and we were trying to hurry. But all of a sudden Mattie dropped down out of the tiers onto the wagon and sat down.

  He said, “I’ve just got to rest a minute. I gave out up there.”

  He was drenched with sweat, p
oor old boy, and he had to be tired. But it was the wrong time to quit. Though Nathan was up in the barn where I couldn’t see his face, I could hear his silence. I wasn’t looking forward to what he was going to say.

  But Burley blew a drop of sweat off the end of his nose and gave Mattie a big smile. He said, “You didn’t give out. You gave up.”

  Burley had been handing the tobacco off the wagon. He was about seventy then, was soaked with sweat himself and as tired as the rest of us, but he was smiling. He said, “You might ought to get better acquainted with Old Willie.” Old Willie was Burley’s name for willpower.

  Mattie got up then and climbed back to his place. As time would tell, he was not one for such work, was no kind of farmer, but he never pulled that trick again.

  Caleb did like to farm and liked to work and was full of enthusiasm. Burley’s corrections to him were usually of the opposite kind: “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down there, Lightning! Let your mind catch up with your feet. We ain’t got time to quit work and go to a funeral.”

  Burley could tease them into sense and into work. He could tease them out of sullenness or anger or danger or the dumps. He would make terrible threats against them—“You boys, if you don’t stop that, I’m going to climb up on top of you and walk around” or “Boys, I’m about to go to work on you all with a two-handed piss-ellum club”—and they would giggle and do what he told them. It was a kind of wonder. They had no fear of him, they knew better than to take him seriously, and yet they would mind him.

  Burley made more or less a secret of being a fiddler, but the family knew it, and a few others. In his younger years he would occasionally take his fiddle to a dance or to someplace where music was being played, as now and again late at night in Jayber Crow’s barbershop.

  He and Kate Helen, Danny’s mother, used to play and sing together. This they handed on to Danny, who could play and sing, and Danny married Lyda, who could sing, and they handed it on to their children. If any of the family were making music, Burley would likely be with them, if he happened to be at the house. He was not always at the house.

  As he got old, Burley would sometimes sit up in his room alone and play. Lyda would hear him up there and would tell me about it. He sometimes played fiddle tunes that had belonged to the place in the old times, that maybe he was the last to know, sometimes he played once-popular country songs, and sometimes, though he was not a churchly man, he played hymns. Playing alone, he played slowly. He couldn’t finger as nimbly as he used to, but he played slowly, it seemed, just to dwell on the notes. It wasn’t the music you would expect, Lyda said, but it was music.

  Maybe because of the stiffness of his fingers, he had grown shyer about his playing, but still there would be times when we would go over to sit till bedtime and he would bring his fiddle down and play if the others were playing. His favorite song, I think, was “Wildwood Flower,” and sometimes he would ask Lyda to sing it with him. He had sung it once, as a lover, with Kate Helen. Now he sang it with his might-as-well-be daughter, and with the tenderness of his love for her.

  One night—this was not long after Mr. Feltner died—toward the end of the evening, he started all alone into “Abide with Me.” He played it once, and then looked at Lyda, asking her to sing, and as he started the tune again, she sang. She sang it all the way through, and all of us understood. This was his mourning and his benediction, not just for his friend Mat Feltner, but for Grandpa and Grandma Coulter, Kate Helen, Jarrat, Tom, Uncle Jack, for the membership of his life and ours, its long suffering, past and to come:Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

  All of us were crying by the time they finished. Lyda ceased, and Burley played it through again, a final time, slowly, leaning forward as if the better to pour the music out of the f-holes. He laid the fiddle across his lap, wiped his tears on the back of his hand, looked at us and smiled, and then he laughed his laugh of pleasure at what they had done.

  13

  Ivy

  I have not been back to our old place, Grandmam’s place, at Shagbark since my father died. It is dear to me, or the memory of it is, but for a long time I feared the sight of what had become of it.

  After Elvin and Allen were gone and my father was dead, Ivy lived on alone in the old house for a while. But the house was getting ready to tumble down on top of Ivy, who by then was living in the kitchen, and there was no longer any reason for the family to “hang on to it,” as they said. And so the place was bought as “an investment” by some people in Cincinnati, who promptly solved the problem of the old house by burning it down and replacing it with a mobile home.

  This was no proper concern of mine, since Ivy, as Grandmam had foreseen, was my father’s only heir. From her his inheritance, if anything was left of it, was to pass to Elvin and Allen. But without trying to know, I knew everything that happened, for of course there are always people who volunteer to keep you informed.

  With her share of the proceeds from the sale of the place and her checks from Social Security, Ivy made her last stand in a used mobile home of her own on the site of another burnt house next to the store, now shut, at Shagbark.

  I would tell myself that Ivy’s fate was not my concern. But of course it was, for I had never ceased to think of her. The hardest resentments to give up are the ones you felt knowingly as a child, and I had kept a list of resentments against Ivy. I never reconciled myself to her marriage to my father, which I continued to think had damaged him and insulted my mother. And I remembered every one of her injustices to me. I had hated her for her power over us, and at times I had been afraid of her. I had enough imagination to know what a life I would have lived if it had not been for Grandmam.

  After Grandmam died, I imagined that my father would give me her silver broach and earrings. I used too much imagination that time, for he did not give them to me, and I knew perfectly that Ivy had taken them for herself.

  I don’t want you to think, Andy Catlett, that I dwelt on the subject of Ivy. I didn’t. I had a plenty else to think about. I was a grown woman with a husband and children and a place of my own. I had a good life, and I knew it. But I was not forgetting Ivy, either. From time to time, too often maybe, I thought of her, and when I thought of her I thought of the broach and earrings that she did not deserve and was unworthy to wear. That thought, when I had it on my mind, was like a grain of corn in my shoe.

  And then one afternoon, when the thought of Ivy was miles away, I met her.

  I had gone into the dry goods store at Hargrave, the old Klinger’s Dry Goods that by now stands as empty as the store at Shagbark, to look for dress material. Mrs. Klinger was showing me what they had while I looked and felt and mused. And then I was aware that an old woman whose head hardly came to my shoulder was standing beside me.

  She was wearing a head scarf and a dress that hung on her as it would have hung on a chair. She was shrunken and twisted by arthritis and was leaning on two canes. Her hands were so knotted as hardly to look like hands. She was smiling at me. She said, “You don’t know me, do you?”

  I knew her then, and almost instantly there were tears on my face. I started feeling in my purse for a handkerchief and tried to be able to say something. All kinds of knowledge came to me, all in a sort of flare in my mind. I knew for one thing that she was more simpleminded than I had ever thought. She had perfectly forgot, or had never known, how much and how justly I had resented her. But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor sufferer who stood there with me?

  “Yes, Ivy, I know you,” I said, and I sounded kind.

  I didn’t understand exactly what had happened until the thought of her woke me up in the middle of that night, and I was saying to myself, “You have forgiven her.”

  I had. My old hatred and contempt and fear, that I had kept so carefully so long, were gone, and I was free.

  14

  The Room of Love

  I was twenty-six years
getting from my birth in the old house on the Steadman place at Shagbark to a house and place of my own, and to a long-going, day-to-day marriage. As I said before, the marriage had troubles in it, which is easy to say. It had something else in it too, which is not so easy. As I go about quietly by myself in my days now or lie awake in the night, I hunt for the way to speak of it, for it is the best thing I have known in this world, and it lays its peace on everything else I know.

  What the marriage had in it, of course, was Nathan and me. We were in it together because of our plighting of troth, his to me, mine to him, and that was one thing. But we were together in it also because, from time to time, often enough, we were in it by desire, we met entirely in it and were one flesh. What that was and is and means is not altogether going to be found in words.

  This was a marriage that did not begin with a honeymoon, and that tells one of the important things about it. We got married and went to work. We had to, we didn’t have time or money to spare. And a honeymoon was something we never greatly missed. Nathan said, “It would have been nice if we’d had it, but we didn’t have it.” We had our living to make, and our place to make while we made our living. We were at work pretty quick after the groom kissed the bride. We had debts to pay and a long effort ahead of us.

  The making of the place was the thing that ruled over everything else, for we were living from the place. Little Margaret, and our boys after they came, were living from the place. You can see that it is hard to mark the difference between our life and our place, our place and ourselves.

  As the years passed and our life changed, the place changed. It emerged, you might say, from what it had been into what we needed and wanted it to be, never perfect of course, but always a little better. It came under the influence of what we foresaw in it, and of our ways of using it and going about in it.