Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Another reason she went over there in those days was to get them to tell her stories about her dad. Mrs. Feltner would tell me of this, thinking I would want to know, and I did. It pleased me to know. I had always talked to her about Virgil, praising him to her, telling her things that made me happy to remember about our courtship and the brief time of our marriage. But I couldn’t tell her as much as the Feltners could. After all, they had known him a lot longer than I had. They were his parents still, and I was no longer his wife.

  I think that by sitting with them, letting them tell her stories about Virgil when he was a baby, when he was a boy, when he was a grown-up young man, she sort of came to know him. She was able to come into his presence, so to speak.

  One evening after she had been over there, it was not long after she graduated from high school, I found her crying in her room, trying to keep me from hearing, but I had heard.

  I said, “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  She had been lying face-down on her bed. When I spoke, she got up and came to me and hugged me. She said, “Oh, Momma!” And then a great grief came just tearing out of her. I had never heard her cry like that before, and I knew what had happened. They had been talking over there. Something had been said that had made Virgil’s death real to her at last, and she was weeping for him, for her grandparents, for me, for herself.

  I led her over to the rocking chair by the window and sat down and drew her onto my lap and held her and rocked her a long time while she cried and I cried. We wept it out together, she for the first time, I for the last, that old sorrow.

  After that, we were two women. She took charge of herself. She grew up. We have been friends from then until now, though we have lived apart.

  To be the mother of a grown-up child means that you don’t have a child anymore, and that is sad. When the grown-up child leaves home, that is sadder. I wanted Margaret to go to college, but when she actually went away it broke my heart. Maybe if you had enough children you could get used to those departures, but, having only three, I never did. I felt them like amputations. Something I needed was missing. Sometimes, even now, when I come into this house and it sounds empty, before I think I will wonder, “Where are they?”

  She went, like her brothers in their time, up to the university in Lexington. She had always liked writing letters, and she wrote to us and to her grandparents, a faithful girl. She would come home on the vacations. She was living already, and was preparing to live, in a different world from ours. But her goodness was that she kept on liking the world that she had come from. When she came home she just quietly went to work with us.

  It is possible, as I know well, for farm-raised children to go to college and learn to be embarrassed by their parents and by their “rural background.” Margaret never did. She was proud of us and kind to us. She brought her roommates and other friends home with her and showed Nathan and me and our place to them as proudly as if they had read about us in a book. Among her friends would sometimes be a boy, nothing serious.

  And then, in the spring of her junior year, she began bringing Marcus. Or rather he began bringing her down here in his car. He was Marcus Settlemeyer. A nice boy. A nice young man. Good-looking and smart. He was from Louisville and knew nothing of such a life as ours, but he knew how to make himself at home with us. We liked him, which was made easy because he liked us. He was a year older than Margaret and a year ahead of her in school, but they had had some classes together and had got to know each other, and this time, if I knew the signs, it was serious.

  One evening when they had come down for the Easter weekend, Margaret caught me by myself on the back porch. As she was apt to do, she just stood there smiling until I looked at her. When I did, she said, “Momma, don’t you think Marcus and Margaret make a pretty sound together?”

  The lightning flew through my heart, and for a minute I couldn’t answer. And then I said, and I was surprised to hear Mrs. Feltner’s voice in my own, “Honey, as long as they make a pretty sound to you, they’ll sound pretty to me.”

  The next time she came home she was wearing his ring.

  Marcus was planning to teach history and, he hoped, be a track coach in a high school. He graduated that spring and, sure enough, soon got the job he wanted at a school in Louisville. Margaret would stay in school in Lexington. They would wait to get married until she had finished. They were being sensible, and we were pleased. But we had seen the writing on the wall. Margaret was not going to come home.

  The wedding, when the time for it came, made quite a commotion: two bridal showers, a lot of shopping and fixing, and the wedding itself. The first shower was given by some friends of Marcus’s parents in a nice house on the outskirts of Louisville. For that and the wedding I got new dresses. Lyda Branch and Andy Catlett’s wife Flora went to Louisville with me and helped me pick out two dresses that made me feel more splendid than anything I had had since the white-collared blue dress that Grandmam gave me to graduate in. When I wore the first one, the shower dress, Nathan shaded his eyes with his hand and said, “Well now!” And he gave me one of his better hugs.

  The Louisville shower was for invited guests, Settlemeyer family and friends whose connections branched through the city like a nervous system. It was a very proper occasion, the house lovely and bright with cut flowers, the ladies all beautifully dressed, the gifts beautiful too, and everybody so kind and welcoming to Margaret that I kept having to look away and think of something else to keep from crying.

  The Port William shower didn’t distinguish the masses from the classes, as Ernest Finley used to say. The invitation went out by announcement at church and by hearsay. All the women could come who wanted to, and it seemed that just about everybody wanted to. The shower was in the dining room of the old Coulter home place, which is to say Lyda Branch’s house. At one end of the long table was a punch bowl and good things to eat. At the other end Margaret sat in front of a pile of presents. The ladies sat in chairs around all four walls. As Margaret opened the presents, she held them up for everybody to see, and then they were passed from hand to hand around the room. Some of the presents were jokes: a baby potty with very realistic contents made by soaking graham crackers in water, and a pair of knee-length blue silk drawers that Margaret must have opened six times because her friends kept re-wrapping them and slipping them back into the pile. Others were remembrances or reminders. Mrs. Feltner gave her a pair of embroidered pillowcases made by Margaret’s great-grandmother Feltner when she was still Nancy Beechum, nearly a hundred years ago. They were handled around the room as if they were living things.

  The wedding was in the church in Port William with a reception afterwards in the basement. It was another event open to the general public, at least as far as Port William was concerned. I have wondered sometimes if that was what Margaret really wanted. It may be that she wanted it because she thought I wanted it, and I wanted it because I thought she wanted it. Anyhow, it was a big wedding, and we made as pretty a thing of it as we could.

  Marcus said the crowd was “an interesting mix,” and I guess it was. There were the bridesmaids and the groomsmen, nifty, pretty kids in their gowns and tuxedos. There were Marcus’s family and friends from Louisville and farther away. And from Port William there was Mrs. Feltner, needing to be helped along by her grandson Andy, and all the other Catletts and all the Danny Branches and all the Grover Gibbses and Jayber Crow, the barber, and, it looked like, everybody else, all wearing their Sunday clothes. And there was Burley Coulter wearing his ancient blue suit and his only tie that he wore only on the most solemn occasions, a wide, bright red tie with a large yellow flower on it.

  Ghosts attend such events. I don’t know how else to say it. This was 1967. Mr. Feltner had been dead for two years, and Virgil for twenty-two. You know the ghosts are there when you see as they see, not as they saw but as they see. You feel them with you, not as they were but as they are. I never shed a tear that day, but all day long I saw Margaret as her father and her grandf
ather saw her. I loved her that day with my love but also with theirs. When I turned with the rest of the crowd to look and saw Nathan bringing her down the aisle, she smiling at Marcus waiting for her, and Nathan, I knew, wishing only to do well and go home, I saw her as Virgil and Mr. Feltner saw her, and I thought I would perish with the knowledge of loss and of having.

  So Margaret married Marcus. They rented an apartment in Louisville, and Margaret got a job teaching the fifth grade. They would be one couple with two jobs, two incomes, and, if I’m not mistaken, two bank accounts. Margaret’s school was a long way from Marcus’s and in the opposite direction from their apartment. Because of that, she had to buy a car of her own right away. She borrowed the money to buy the car from the Independent Farmers Bank in Port William. The interest on the loan raised the cost of the car a lot higher than the sale price, and by the time she paid off the loan the worth of the car would be a lot less than she paid for it. In the meantime, they would have to pay for everything else they needed. Everything. I hadn’t thought before of the fix they would be getting themselves into, but now that I did I was afraid for them. They were hardly going to be able to breathe without paying somebody for the privilege.

  I said to Nathan, “They’re starting out behind.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just shook his head.

  When we got married he had an old pickup truck that he had paid for with cash. It was a rattletrap, but we drove it until the children got so big we couldn’t all sit in it. We had a debt on the farm, of course, for what seemed to us a lot of money in those days, but we went straight to work to make it worth more than Nathan had paid for it. We paid off that debt in nine years, and from then on, as Nathan liked to say, we never owed a nickel to anybody. We were paid up, living on our own land that was paid for, and so our work kept us.

  You send your children to college, you do the best you can for them, and then, because you have to be, you’re careful not to make plans for them. You don’t want to be disappointed, and you don’t want to burden them with your expectations either. But you keep a little thought, a little hope, that maybe they’ll go away and study and learn and then come back, and you’ll have them for neighbors. You’ll have the comfort of being with them and having them for companions. You’ll have your grandchildren nearby where you can get to know them and help to raise them. But that doesn’t happen often anymore, and you know better than to hope too much. Or you ought to.

  After each one of our children went away to the university, there always came a time when we would feel the distance opening to them, pulling them away. It was like sitting snug in the house, and a door is opened somewhere, and suddenly you feel a draft.

  When Margaret set out to be a teacher, it was easy enough to think she might come home to teach. They had closed the school in Port William in 1964 and started taking the children to the new elementary school at Hargrave. Maybe, at least, she would end up no farther from home than Hargrave. But we knew it was iffy. More than likely she was going to marry somebody from away and would live away. That was expectable, and when it happened we weren’t surprised. Having no choice but to let her go, we let her go, glad that she went no farther than Louisville.

  16

  M. B. Coulter

  With every year that passed it was getting less likely that a farmer’s child was going to grow up to be a farmer. When our boys were still babies a great man in Washington was telling the farmers, “Get big or get out.” The good farm economy that had held up through the war, and for a while after, began to weaken. By our hard work and investment we were going to be earning always a little less. It was going to get harder to farm and harder to expect your children to farm.

  Mathew Burley Coulter, our Mattie, had the right middle name, I guess. With him, I came nearest to having a Burley Coulter to raise. He was a fun-loving boy, fine-looking, a little too attractive to girls when the time came for that, a little too eager to climb Fool’s Hill. He had a wild streak in him, maybe, but it was my consolation that he could have been a lot wilder than he was. He could have been as wild as Burley Coulter, except for one thing: He had a mind that was studious. He could be attracted and pacified by the sort of things they teach in school. His interest ran to mathematics and science and to fixing things. From about the time he started into high school, whenever any of the equipment needed fixing, his daddy just handed it over to him.

  He got good grades in school and satisfied his teachers, but what he learned seemed to have less and less to do with school. If there was something to be learned, especially in a subject he liked, he learned it. If they assigned him a textbook, he learned what was in it. But he was going ahead more or less on his own, just interested and eager.

  At home he was a fascinating boy to be around and watch, he was so intent on what he was interested in and so good at it. As for farming, he did the work he was expected to do, and that was all. He did exactly what he was told to do, right up to the line, and no more. He wouldn’t see work and do it on his own. Nathan would teach and prompt and occasionally plead and sometimes give him hell direct. But Mattie was looking away. He wasn’t interested.

  Nathan said, “I don’t know what he’s going to turn into. But he’s not a farmer now and I’ll be surprised if he ever is one.”

  Mattie was the only one of the three that Nathan and I ever really disagreed over. Nathan had good eyes and I trusted them, but I couldn’t make myself care enough that Mattie should look with Nathan’s eyes and see what he saw. Nathan cared plenty, and he could be awfully impatient and short with Mattie. Mattie dealt with this by getting away or, if he couldn’t get away, by shutting up. They weren’t always at odds, but when they were the space between them was occupied by, of course, me. And of course they complained to me about each other. And of course, loving them both, I tried to defend them to each other. The good part was that I could defend them to each other.

  “Maybe you are the one who’ll have to have the patience,” I would say to Mattie. “Maybe you’re the one who’ll have to try harder. But your daddy loves you, you know. Whatever you’re doing, right or wrong, and whatever you’re thinking about him, he loves you.”

  That was the truth, and Mattie knew it. He wouldn’t argue.

  To Nathan I said, “I just think you need to be more patient with him. And with yourself too.”

  And he, who would argue, said, “All I want is to see that kid do one day’s work because he wants to and not because he has to. That’s the only difference I’m asking for, but it’s one that matters.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve got to expect less. Or expect something else. He’s not you. He’s maybe never going to see what you see or want what you want.”

  “Then, damn it to hell, you deal with him.”

  “I will deal with him. I’ve dealt with him since before he was born, and I’m going to deal with him. And so are you. Listen, he’s a good boy. He loves you, whether he shows it or not. And you love him. He’s your son.”

  Well, when Mattie finally grew all his feathers and flew off to the university, it broke my heart again, but it was a relief. I know it was a relief to him. And in different ways it was a relief to Nathan and me. It was his life that Mattie was living in after that, not ours. And once he was out from underfoot, Nathan was proud of him, for he did well.

  He was proud of him but skeptical too, or maybe just sort of resigned. Mattie, anyhow, pretty quickly went beyond us. He studied electrical engineering, and then he got interested in communications technology and information technology, things he couldn’t talk to us about because we knew so little.

  Once, Nathan asked me, “Communication of what?”

  I said, “God knows what.”

  And that was about the extent of our conversation on that subject. We didn’t know what.

  He was in graduate school a while, and then he lit out for the West Coast where he had been offered a high-paying, high-technological job. He was exceptional, and of course we were proud. But we were le
ft behind too. We gave him up to whatever he was going to do.

  He has been on the West Coast ever since. Now he is the CEO, as he puts it, of an information-processing company whose name is made of letters that don’t spell anything. What he does I leave it to him to know. He is earning a lot of money and flying here and there about the world. He calls up maybe twice a month, but he doesn’t come back often. Sometimes he sends a letter, usually a letter dictated to a secretary and signed, you can tell, with a bunch of other letters: “Very truly yours, M. B. Coulter.” And I will laugh, for he is still going on in a hurry from one thing to another without looking back, the way he always did.

  Once a year, maybe, he will bring his current family for a visit. It will be his vacation. Or rather part of his vacation. They fly to Cincinnati or Louisville, rent a car, and drive here on their way to or from someplace else.

  I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

  He fits my love, but he no longer fits the place or our life or the knowledge of anything here. Since a long time ago, when he has come back he has come as a stranger. He and his wife and their children and I are strangers. We spend two or three days trying mightily to be nice to one another, and even succeeding, but we remain strangers. We don’t know the same things. We have nothing in common to talk about. We don’t always agree about the news, and so we avoid that. I ask about their lives, but they have little confidence that I can understand their lives, and they don’t tell me much. The conversation, to keep itself going, keeps circling back to Port William, to things Mattie remembers, to people he used to know—memories, you can tell, that seem a little odd to him now, as if from another life—while his wife smiles and pretends to be interested, and the children play on the floor with the toys they have brought and pay no attention.