Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Though we talked of what was possible and what needed to be done, the shaping of the place, the look of it, was mostly Nathan’s doing. He had a way of getting it right.

  He didn’t want to come out and say so, but he was proud of his work.

  When Andy Catlett would come back after one of his longish absences from home and would come to see us, Nathan would ask him, “Well, do you see anything different?”

  It would be a new building or an old one renewed or a new fence, or a coat of paint somewhere. Andy would shake his head and grin, knowing he was being tested and was failing the test. Nathan would have to tell him, “Look at the barn” or “Look at the lot fence” or “Look at the corncrib.”

  Andy would say, “Oh!” and make the proper compliment, for he would be honestly pleased as soon as he saw what he needed to see.

  Later Nathan would laugh. “He’s the same damned dreamy kid he’s always been.”

  But this wasn’t exactly Andy’s fault. What Nathan had done was what should have been done. The place never looked as if something had been changed. It looked right. It looked the way it ought to have looked. It looked right because the right man was doing the work. If the wrong man had done it, Andy, even you would have noticed.

  Nathan always got up before I did. If it was winter he would build the fires. As the children grew big enough to have their own morning chores, he would get them up. I would hear them go out. The nighttime quiet would fill the house again. And then I would get up and dress and go to the kitchen. I would have breakfast ready by the time they came in with the milk.

  Except when I was needed in the crew work of the busiest farming seasons, I kept the house, worked in the garden, and took care of the chickens, doing the work again that I had done with Grandmam when I was a girl, except that now I usually didn’t do the milking. As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

  The house, its furnishings and surroundings, took on the appearance given it by my ways of work and my liking, just as Nathan’s work and his liking altered the looks of the farm. And as our work shaped our workplaces, our work and our workplaces shaped our days. Our work brought us together and drew us apart. Sometimes we would be together only at mealtimes and at night. Sometimes we would be together at the same work most of the day.

  We had differences. There were the agreed-on differences of work. There were the accepted, mostly happy differences between a man and a woman. There were the differences of nature and character that were sometimes happy and sometimes not. Some of the things that most endeared Nathan to me—his quietness, his love of his work, his determination—were the things that could sometimes make me maddest at him.

  He hated waste, and he was not a waster. It is not surprising that he did not waste words. He said exactly what he had to say, and he meant what he said. He was inclined not to say again what he had said before. You had to listen to him, as the children knew, because he wasn’t going to repeat himself. Sometimes he would be finished talking before we had started listening. He didn’t rattle. I liked that and was proud of him for it, but I have to say too that it could be a burden. There would be times when he didn’t have much to say about anything. If that lasted long enough, I began to feel his quietness as distance. There he would be—so I would think to myself—outside love, outside marriage, way off by himself. Which of course left me by myself. Sometimes it would make me mad, and then I would make him mad. This was not something I did by deliberate intention but was just something I did. When we were both mad, we would have something to say to each other. It wasn’t love, but it beat indifference, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, it would come to love.

  Sometimes Nathan would do the same thing to me. We would get strayed apart somehow, he would get lonesome, and first thing you know he would do something to make me mad. I think husbands pick fights with their wives sometimes just to get their attention. If you can’t get her hot, make her mad. You can’t hold it against them. Or anyhow I can’t, for as I’ve just confessed, I did it too.

  Sometimes, too, Nathan’s eagerness in his work would come across as nothing but impatience. That was his father in him. There were times when he was apt to run over you if you didn’t get out of his way. He wasn’t stubborn exactly, he was determined. There was a demand in him that you could feel. He didn’t have to speak.

  When I would be helping him with the cattle and would make a misstep and let one get by me, he would never say anything. He would just give me a look. Sometimes, doing that, he could make me so mad I could have shot him right between the eyes. He knew it too.

  Once when I gave him his look back with interest, he laughed. He said, “Hannah, you’d be a bad hand to carry a pistol.”

  I didn’t laugh. I stayed mad at him for about a day. And then finally he asked me, “Are you a pretty good shot with a pistol?”

  “I couldn’t hit the side of a barn,” I said. “Lucky for you.”

  We both laughed then, and it was all right.

  We had often enough the pleasure of making up, because we fell out often enough. But now, looking back, it is hard to say why we fell out, or what we fell out about, or why whatever we fell out about ever mattered. Even then it was sometimes hard to say.

  One time we were fussing and Nathan looked at me right in the middle of it and said, “Hannah, what in the hell got us started on this?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know either,” he said. “So I think I’m going to quit.”

  “Well, go ahead and quit,” I said.

  He said, “I already did.” And that was the last word that time.

  You have had this life and no other. You have had this life with this man and no other. What would it have been to have had a different life with a different man? You will never know. That makes the world forever a mystery, and you will just have to be content for it to be that way.

  We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that. We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed. When distance came between us, we would blame it on each other. And here is a wonder. I maybe never loved him so much or yearned toward him so much as when I was mad at him. It’s not a simple thing, this love.

  It wasn’t always anger that came between us. Work could come between us. Thoughts could come between us. Feeling in different ways about the children could come between us. We would go apart, Nathan into whatever loneliness was his, I into mine. We would be like stars or planets in their orbits moving apart. And then we would come into alignment again, the sun and the moon and the earth. And then it would be as if we were coming together for the first time. It was like the time when I had decided that I would belong to whatever it was that we would be together, and I looked straight back at him at last. He would look at me with a grin that I knew. He would say, “Is it all right?” And I would say, “It’s all right.” The knowledge of his desire and of myself as desirable and of my desire would come over me. He would come to me as my guest, and I would be his welcomer.

  What I was always reaching toward in him was his gentleness that had been made in him by loss and grief and suffering, a gentleness opposite to the war that he was not going to talk about, and never did, but that I know at least something about, having learned it since he died.

  The gentleness I knew in him seemed to be calling out, and it was a gentleness in me that answered. That gentleness, calling and answering, giving and taking, brought us together. It brought us into the room of love. It made our place clear around us.

  Nathan said, “You’ve seen those dragonflies flying together joined. How do they know to fly in the same
direction?”

  “They know,” I said. “They know the same way we know.”

  That was what I wanted to say, and as I said it I realized it was what he wanted me to say.

  It would be again like the coming of the rhymes in a song, a different song, this one, a long song, the rhymes sometimes wide apart, but the rhymes would come.

  The rhymes came. But you may have a long journey to travel to meet somebody in the innermost inwardness and sweetness of that room. You can’t get there just by wanting to, or just because the night falls. The meeting is prepared in the long day, in the work of years, in the keeping of faith, in kindness.

  The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

  If you want to know why even in telling of trouble and sorrow I am giving thanks, this is why.

  15

  A Better Chance

  Now that they are grown up and a long way gone, I am safe in saying that I had good children. I don’t mean that they weren’t lively and wide awake often enough when we were tired, or that they didn’t make their share of messes and their share of mischief, or that they didn’t cause us a fair amount of worry, or that they didn’t sometimes sulk or complain or fight each other.

  What I mean is that they accepted our love for them, and they loved us back. They did the work we needed for them to do, and mainly they learned to do it well. They never got into serious trouble away from home. They were good students and did well in school. Sometimes, now, I allow myself to wish that at least Caleb had not done so well in school.

  I think I got off light. Heredity being what it is, I thought I might have to raise another Burley Coulter, and I’m glad to have been spared. Much as I have always loved him, it would have been hard to be his mother.

  When they were young, I suppose all my thoughts about the children started with knowing they were mine. Because they were mine, I had to think of what I should do for them, of what Nathan and I could do for them to get them started in the world, of what they needed. Now all my thoughts about them start with knowing that they are gone.

  They are gone. They come back varyingly often, and I remain attached to them, by love entirely, and partly by continuing knowledge. But the old ties, to be plain about it, are mostly broken. We live in different places, lead lives that are different, have different hopes and thoughts, know different things. We don’t talk alike anymore.

  I take some blame on myself for this. Maybe, given the times and fashions, it couldn’t have happened in any other way. But I am sorry for my gullibility, my lack of foreknowledge, my foolish surprise at the way it turned out. Grandmam, who never went to high school, was desperate for me to go to high school. And I, who never went to college, was desperate for my children to go to college. Nathan, who also had never been to college, was less ambitious for the children than I was, but he agreed with me. We both wanted to send them to college, because we felt we owed it to them. That was the way we explained it to ourselves when we were saving the money and making the sacrifices it took to send them: “Well, we owe them that much. They’re smart and they ought to go.” It just never occurred to either of us that we would lose them that way. The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

  The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order to move up, you have got to move on. I didn’t see this at first. And for a while after I knew it, I pretended I didn’t. I didn’t want it to be true.

  But it was true. After they all were gone, I was mourning over them to Nathan. I said, “I just wanted them to have a better chance than I had.”

  Nathan said, “Don’t complain about the chance you had,” in the same way exactly that he used to tell the boys, “Don’t cuss the weather.” Sometimes you can say dreadful things without knowing it. Nathan understood this better than I did.

  Like several of his one-sentence conversations, this one stuck in my mind and finally changed it. The change came too late, maybe, but it turned my mind inside out like a sock.

  Was I sorry that I had known my parents and Grandmam and Ora Finley and the Catletts and the Feltners, and that I had married Virgil and come to live in Port William, and that I had lived on after Virgil’s death to marry Nathan and come to our place to raise our family and live among the Coulters and the rest of our membership?

  Well, that was the chance I had.

  And so Nathan required me to think a thought that has stayed with me a long time and has traveled a long way. It passed through everything I know and changed it all. The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

  Here is my worry.

  When they were little the children were always wanting stories. We read them stories and we told them stories. The stories they wanted most to be told were the stories of Nathan’s childhood at Port William and mine at Shagbark.

  “Tell us what you did when you were little.”

  “Tell us about the old days.”

  Well, the days before the war were “the old days,” sure enough. The war changed the world. The days when Nathan and I were little, before we had electricity and plumbing and tractors and blacktopped roads and nuclear bombs, must have seemed almost legendary to the children, and so they were fascinated.

  But did we tell the stories right? It was lovely, the telling and the listening, usually the last thing before bedtime. But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?

  I don’t know, but I have had to ask. Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn’t that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn’t that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?

  And how are you ever to know where the thread breaks, and when the tug begins?

  Maybe it was because she was five years older than her oldest brother that Margaret always wanted to be a schoolteacher. If she hadn’t really wanted to be a teacher, I guess she would have been badly discouraged by having her brothers as students. As soon as they were big enough to be played with, she would sit them in chairs and get behind a little table she had and teach them. It was a frustration from beginning to end. They were quick enough at learning, but they didn’t want to learn anything from her. From the time they had minds of their own, she was always having to find them where they had hidden from her or run them down and catch them. And I would hear her saying things like “Children! May I have your attention?” Even so, for yea
rs her favorite play was to get somebody, even me, to pretend to be a student while she pretended to be a teacher. And so of course we expected that she would be a teacher when she grew up.

  In looks she took after Mrs. Feltner maybe more than anybody. She was made like Mrs. Feltner, rather slight and fine. She was a pretty girl, with a good figure when she finally got one.

  She was self-possessed and industrious, good-hearted and quiet, and plenty smart. In school she was always, I think, a sort of model student, as able to please as she was anxious to please. What people outside the family most often thought to call her was “a fine girl.” She loved Nathan and got along with him so well that I sometimes envied him.

  There was a passage of time when she and I got on each other’s nerves and were often at outs. And it wasn’t altogether her fault. I was as anxious about her as Grandmam had been about me. I knew she had sense, but I was afraid she wouldn’t use it when she needed it. Even then, I think, I knew I was spending too much time telling her things she had already figured out for herself. But I couldn’t bear not to tell her, and she couldn’t bear to hear me. Later, when she finally was grown up and we were friends again, she said that what infuriated her the most was knowing she agreed with me.

  When there was heat between us, and even when there wasn’t, she would often ease away and take the path over to the Feltners’. They adored her, of course, and were always happy to see her—as in fact they were to see the boys when they came along. They would give her a big welcome and be really sweet to her, though they never in any way put themselves between her and me.

  Their house had been her home for the first three years of her life, and of course it still felt like home to her. Going there restored something to her that she missed and needed. As long as the Feltners lived, her old bedroom was called “Little Margaret’s room.”