Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Mattie has four children by two wives, and between those two there was another woman he was at least traveling with. All Nathan and I ever knew of her was what Mattie told us when he introduced her: “Folks, this is Helen.”

  Though we kept on calling him “Mattie,” and I still do, the name fits him as poorly now as he fits this place. We have no other name for him, but he doesn’t look right for the name. He looks like somebody expecting to be called “Mr. Coulter.” His present wife calls him “M.B.”

  He has too much honesty to pretend to be interested in whatever is happening here on the place. Farming is behind him now, and it is completely behind him. He was always looking away, and now when he is here it appears really that he doesn’t see where he is. His children, as they have come along, have picked this up from him. When they are here they don’t know where they are. And maybe it is not possible for them to find out. They don’t want to know.

  The oldest pair of Mattie’s children are grown up now, and I haven’t seen them for a long time. The youngest pair, two boys, are now twelve and thirteen. Like their older brother and sister, they would spend their whole visit in the house or on the porch if I would let them. They bring games that they play on the little computer they always have with them. They play their games or they sit and watch television. Before they come and while they’re here I think of things to show them: a new calf, a hawk’s nest, the old hollow tree. I take them fishing in the ponds. I take them out to help me in the garden or the henhouse. I send them out to see whatever the Branches are doing. It all somehow fails. They don’t much like any of it. By no fault of theirs, they don’t know enough to like it. They don’t know the things that I and even their daddy have known since before we knew anything.

  And what ever in their lives will they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?

  My love for Mattie’s children was made in my love for Mattie, but it was also made in Port William. It doesn’t fit the children, who had their making elsewhere, and they don’t fit it. It is a failed love, and hard to bear. For me, it is hard to bear. The children don’t notice, of course, and don’t mind.

  When they leave I am sad to see them go, and I am sad that it should seem right that they should be gone.

  17

  Caleb

  Margaret was a bright girl, a top student, and she has always had plenty of sense. Mattie has always had the reputation of being “brilliant,” and maybe he is. Maybe he has made enough money to prove it. But I am not a good authority on Mattie. He has gone beyond about everything I know. I don’t know if I am right or wrong in wishing, as I sometimes do, that he had more sense.

  The tale of Caleb is maybe the most complicated of the three. As a boy Caleb never wanted to be in school, though he has wound up in school for life, or at least for life until retirement. I am not sure how smart Caleb is. He is not “brilliant,” maybe, and yet he seems always to have been as smart as he has wanted to be.

  He didn’t want to be in school, when he was a boy, because he wanted to be here, at home. He wanted to be at work with his daddy, which he was, on every day that Nathan would let him come along, from the time he could walk until he started to school. Nathan had more to do with raising Caleb than I did. I would have made a momma’s boy of him, maybe, if he had let me. He was the last. But his natural calling, I think, was to be a farmer. Farming was what he played at before he could work at it. When he got big enough to work, he liked the work. Farming was what he thought about and dreamed about. He loved it. When Mattie would be doing what was expected of him, no more, and getting away, Caleb would do his work and then look around for something else that needed to be done.

  When he was just a little thing, if the work permitted it, he would be out with his dad, and maybe Jarrat and Burley too, trying to do as they did. If he got sleepy, Nathan would put him down for a nap at the field edge or on the seat of his pickup, or if the weather was too bad for that, he would come carrying him back to the house asleep. When he was supposed to be staying at the house with me, if I didn’t watch, he would run away to find the men at work. Before he started to school he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.

  He was the one who raised the orphan lambs. He always wanted to have his own hen and chickens. Nathan would give him the runt pigs, and he would feed and care for them in his own pen. He had a bank account by the time he was nine. When he was fourteen, we gave him an acre of tobacco to raise for himself. He dealt with school the way Mattie dealt with the farm, doing what was required and no more, except for the agriculture courses and the Future Farmers of America. He loved to have “projects.” He did his schoolwork without too much effort, made his C’s and a few B’s as if they were exactly what he wanted, caused probably only a normal amount of trouble, fell in and out of love with a girl or two, but the school he was really interested in attending was here. He was his daddy’s student. He never thought of being anything but a farmer.

  So our hope that we might give this place a true inheritor and ourselves a successor naturally fell on Caleb. You could say even that he invited our hope and gladly accepted it. He was a sweet-natured boy, kind-hearted and generous, and I think he liked the thought of pleasing us. When his time came to go up to the university, his plan was to study agriculture and come home to farm.

  He was the youngest, the last, and I hated to see him go. I loved him, I guess, the way mothers usually love their youngest, and he was easy to love, but I was worried about him too. He had been so uninterested and unworried in his schooling so far that I was afraid he would go into those high-powered classes at the university and fail.

  I caught him by himself when he was getting ready to leave and laid down the law, which I hadn’t needed to do with either of the others. I said, “Listen. Don’t go up there and try to get by with a lick and a promise. You’re going up there to study, so study. If you do badly the first semester, don’t expect us to help you with the next one.”

  Not every boy would have taken that in a good spirit. Mattie wouldn’t have. But Caleb tried to console me. He said, “Momma, don’t worry,” and gave me a very kind hug.

  Anytime an eighteen-year-old boy tells you not to worry, you had better worry. And I did. As it turned out, though, I was wasting my time. Caleb went up there and became what he had never been before, a good student. He made whatever struggle he had to make. His grades were decent at first, and they got better as he went along.

  When the distance began to open up for Caleb I am not quite sure. He got a scholarship in the college of agriculture. Because of research projects that he was helping with, his visits home became shorter. In the summer before his senior year he didn’t come home. I began to have this uneasy feeling that he was doing too well. I felt so foolish in that thought that I didn’t mention it to Nathan. I barely had the nerve to mention it to myself.

  Oftentimes after it no longer matters whether things are clear or not, they become clear. After not liking school at all, Caleb had got to liking it too much, more anyhow than I would have wanted him to, if I had had any say. He liked knowing the things he was learning. He was beginning to learn the ways of research, and he liked that. He was, maybe you could say, tempted by it.

  And I know, I can almost hear, the voices that were speaking to him, voices of people he had learned to respect, and they were saying, “Caleb, you’re too bright to be a farmer.”

  They were saying, “Caleb, there’s no future for you in farming.”

  They were saying, “Caleb, why should you be a farmer yourself when you can do so much for farmers? You can be a help to your people.”

  These were the voices of farm-raised people who were saying, “Caleb, why go home and work your ass off for what you’ll earn? Things are going to get worse for farmers.” And they were true prophets. The farmers were at the bottom of the heap. And there were
fewer of them, farming worse and earning less every year. How could you argue with those voices? How could you look straight at your boy and argue that he ought to spend his life at the hardest work, worrying about money and the weather?

  I don’t think there is an argument for being a farmer. There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love. Necessity ends the argument, and so does love. Caleb didn’t need to farm. Going to school had removed the need. With the need gone, he still had love, but he didn’t have enough. Once again, I had felt the distance opening. I had seen the writing on the wall. And Nathan ought to have seen it. I should have helped him to see it.

  Caleb came home the day after he graduated. And that day Nathan did the only really foolish thing I ever saw him do. I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t know it was going to happen until it had already started happening, and I couldn’t help.

  Nathan came to the house for dinner just at noon, the way he always did. He hung his hat on the hook by the back door and washed his hands at the sink. I took up the biscuits, and the three of us, Nathan and Caleb and I, sat down in our old places to eat.

  Nobody said much of anything for a few minutes, and then Nathan looked across the table at Caleb with that point-blank look he had when there was something to be dealt with. He said, “Caleb, we’ve talked before, and now it’s time to talk again. I’ve been thinking about what we have to offer you here, and what we can do for you.”

  All of a sudden I knew a lot more than I had thought I did. Nathan had fooled himself, and he was afraid he had fooled himself, and now he was begging Caleb to tell him that he hadn’t fooled himself. The cold ache of dread settled into the pit of my stomach, and I laid down my fork.

  “There’s this place here,” Nathan said. “Your mother and I aren’t going to live forever. Sooner or later it’s going to need a younger man. And there’s your sister’s place that I’m taking care of; it can use a younger man right now. And there’s my daddy’s little place that was left to me; that can be yours just as soon as we can make the arrangements. Sooner or later you’ll want to get married, and when you do, we can fix up the old house over there. It’ll be your place. Later, maybe, you’ll want to move here.”

  Caleb had turned white. He had raised his glass but he had not carried it all the way to his mouth. He set it back down. Poor boy. He had changed his mind, and he hadn’t told us. He had put it off, thinking it would become easy. He would think of a way to make it easy. He hoped we would figure it out.

  When he spoke, he sounded alarmed, as if only then he realized what he had to tell. “But, Dad, I’m not here to stay. I’m not going to be coming home. I’ve been offered a scholarship to a graduate school. I’ve accepted.”

  There was nothing more to say, Caleb didn’t need a graduate degree to be a farmer, and Nathan didn’t say anything. He went on eating. He had his work to do, and he needed to get back to it. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed and ran down. I don’t think he noticed he was crying.

  That was as near to licked as I ever saw him. Even his death didn’t come as near to beating him as that did. Afterwards, for a long time he was just awfully quiet. He wasn’t angry. Really, he was never much for anger. But it was a hard time. He had lost something he needed, something his place and his family needed. That was 1974. Elton Penn had died that spring, and we were already grieved. Nathan had more on his mind than he could find words for. So did I. I would talk to him, and he would answer pleasantly enough, but we didn’t speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn’t need to. It couldn’t have been “talked out.” It had to be worn out. But all through that time I had an absurd yearning to shelter Nathan from what had already happened.

  Troubled about himself, I think, and sorry for his dad and for me, Caleb lived at home and helped us through that summer. Before the crop was all in the barn, he left for his graduate school in the Midwest.

  And so they were gone, all three. And so they still are gone.

  For a while, especially if you have children, you shape your life according to expectations. That is arguably pretty foolish, for expectation can be a bucketful of smoke. Nobody expected Elton to die. He was only fifty-four. Nobody expected Caleb, who loved to farm, to spend his life in school. But there is some pleasure in expectations too, and I should not be regretful about ours.

  After your expectations have gone their way and your future is getting along the best it can as an honest blank, you shape your life according to what it is. Nathan was fifty in 1974. He was probably as strong as he had ever been, and I would say smarter. He had a lot of years still ahead of him. We had a lot of years still ahead of us. It was up to us then to make them good, and we did.

  One night, after Caleb had left and we had got well into the fall, Nathan and I were sitting at the table after supper. We were tired. Neither of us had said anything for a long time. It had got dark but we hadn’t turned on a light.

  And then Nathan said, “Hannah, my old girl, we’re going to live right on. We’ll love each other, and take care of things here, and we’ll be all right.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re going to love each other, and we’ll be all right.”

  I got up and went to him then.

  And what of Caleb? Caleb eventually became Dr. Coulter. He became a professor, teaching agriculture to fewer and fewer students who were actually going to farm. He became an expert with a laboratory and experimental plots, a man of reputation.

  But as I know, and as he knows in his own heart and thoughts, Caleb is incomplete. He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is always trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.

  He can leave his office on Friday afternoon and drive here in just a few hours, and then drive back again in just a few hours on Sunday afternoon. He often has done that, almost from the time he took his present job. Every chance he got, it seemed, he would be here, if only just overnight, or for only a few hours on his way someplace else or on his way home, to see how we were and if he could do anything for us. Since his daddy’s death, he has come more often than before. Too often, I try to tell him, for a married man with a job and responsibilities.

  Maybe it was because of his feeling of unfinished responsibilities here that he didn’t marry until he was thirty-four. He married Alice Hamilton, who goes by that name. She is a vice president in a pretty large bank. I like her. As a rule, she knows what she thinks and means what she says. She is self-respecting and courteous. She appreciates Caleb’s goodness, which she ought to do, and she is kind to me. She sometimes comes here with Caleb on his visits, but not often. And sometimes she says things to the effect that you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy, which I don’t like. I gather that with her and their circle of friends, Caleb enjoys the reputation of being a country boy. He is Alice’s boy. They have no children.

  They both have done well, and they live well. Caleb is well respected, and I am glad of that. He brings me what he calls his “publications,” written in the Unknown Tongue. He wants me to be proud of them. And I am, but with the sadness of wishing I could be prouder.

  I read all of his publications that he brings me, and I have to say that they don’t make me happy. I can’t hear Caleb talking in them. And they speak of everything according to its general classification. Reading them always makes me think of this farm and how it has emerged, out of “agriculture” and its “soil types” and its collection of “species,” as itself, our place, a place like no other, yielding to Nathan and me a life like no other.


  One of the things that Nathan disliked and feared the most was even the idea of being an employee. Except for his time in the army, he was never “employed” in his life, and he would do everything he could to avoid employing anybody. He hated the idea of working for a boss, and he hated being a boss. Freedom, to him, was being free of being bossed and of being a boss.

  He loved the old free work-swapping with our kinfolks and friends, who needed no bossing but out of their regard and respect for one another did what they were supposed to do. When we would have to hire somebody, as we sometimes did, and he proved unsatisfactory, as he usually did, Nathan would say, “Another damned employee.” And that was the harshest criticism he ever made of the children: “You’re acting like a damned employee.”

  He quit saying such things after Margaret became an employee of her school board and Mattie an employee of his company and Caleb an employee of his university, but I know he kept thinking them. He wanted to be free himself, and he wanted his children to be free.

  Because of the same desire, I suppose, I sometimes allow myself to wonder if Caleb might not wind up here after all. He is forty-eight years old now. He doesn’t know it yet, but it won’t be a long time before he is going to begin to think of retirement, of where he will live out the rest of his life, of where he will die. I think he might want to come home then, having been homesick for most of his life. I think he might consider it. But that may be another bucket of smoke, better not thought of. Alice and her wants will have to be considered too, and the changing of the world. And what would he do here as an old man, after such a life, if he came back?