Nathan Coulter Read online

  Table of Contents

  WENDELL BERRY

  Also by Wendell Berry

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Copyright Page

  WENDELL BERRY

  Andy Catlett

  Hannah Coulter

  Jayber Crow

  The Memory of Old Jack

  Nathan Coulter

  A Place on Earth

  Remembering

  That Distant Land

  A World Lost

  Also by Wendell Berry

  FICTION

  Andy Catlett

  Hannah Coulter

  Fidelity

  Jayber Crow

  The Memory of Old Jack

  A Place on Earth

  Remembering

  That Distant Land

  Watch With Me

  The Wild Birds

  A World Lost

  POETRY

  The Broken Ground

  Clearing

  Collected Poems: 1957-1982

  The Country of Marriage

  Entries

  Farming: A Hand Book

  Findings

  Openings

  A Part

  Sabbaths

  Sayings and Doings

  The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (1998)

  A Timbered Choir

  The Wheel

  ESSAYS

  The Way of Ignorance

  Another Turn of the Crank

  The Art of the Commonplace

  Citizenship Papers

  A Continuous Harmony

  The Gift of Good Land

  Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work

  The Hidden Wound

  Home Economics

  Life Is a Miracle

  Long-Legged House

  Recollected Essays: 1965-1980

  Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community

  Standing by Words

  The Unforeseen Wilderness

  The Unsettling of America

  What Are People For?

  For John

  1

  Dark. The light went out the door when she pulled it to. And then everything came in close around me, the way it was in the daylight, only all close. Because in the dark I could remember and not see. The sun was first, going over the hill behind our barn. Then the river was covered with the shadows of the hills. Then the hills went behind their shadows, and just the house and the barn and the other buildings were left, standing black against the sky where it was still white in the west.

  After supper it was only the inside of the house, lighted where we moved from the kitchen to the living room and upstairs to bed. Until the last of the light went out the door; and it was all there in the room, close enough to touch if I didn’t reach out my hand. The dark broke them loose and let them in. The memory was closer than the sight of them. What was left outside was the way it had been before anybody had come there to see anything.

  I lay awake listening to the wind blow. It was the beginning of the dream, I knew, even if I was still awake listening. The wind came hard against the back of the house and rattled the weatherboarding and whooped around the corners; and went on through the woods on the hillside, bending the trees and cracking the limbs together; and on with a lonely, hollow sound into the river bottoms; and on over the country, over the farms and roads and towns and cities. It seemed that I could hear the sounds the wind made in all the places it was, all at the same time.

  I never knew when I began to dream the wind and quit listening to it. But after a while the bed rose off the floor and floated out of the house. It flew up high over the roof and sailed down again to the hillside above the river. The wind pulled at the bedclothes and I had to hold them around my neck to keep them from blowing away.

  Standing at the edge of the woods was a lion, looking up at the house, with the valley and the river lying in the dark behind him. I could see every muscle in his body rolled up smooth under his hide. The wind blew through his mane. His eyes reminded me of Grandpa’s, they were so fierce and blue.

  While I watched he lifted his head and roared toward the house, his white teeth showing and his tongue curled under the sound. I knew then it wasn’t the wind I’d heard, but the lion’s voice, lonely and like a wind. The muscles in his belly hardened and heaved the voice out of his mouth; and he stood quiet while the sound went on and on over the country. I held the covers around my neck and watched him, and heard his voice go through the woods and into the valley and against the walls of the houses where the people were asleep.

  Late in the night the bed floated into the house again. And it was quiet until the roosters began to crow in the dark where the voice of the lion had been. While the roosters crowed I dreamed of them, their voices crying in the barns and henhouses, close and far away under the dark. In my dream their combs were red, and their feathers black as coal. And while I slept they crowed the dark away.

  Sunlight came red into my sleep and I nearly woke until I turned over and slept again in the shadow of my face. Then the light brightened and hardened in the room and I couldn’t sleep any longer. But I kept my eyes closed, remembering what I’d dreamed.

  I heard Mother walk across the kitchen floor and shove the teakettle to the back of the stove. I listened to her clear away the dishes that she and Daddy had used for their breakfast and begin cooking breakfast for Brother and me. The sounds separated me from the night, and I let my eyes come open.

  Brother was still asleep on the other side of the room. He’d thrown the sheet off and was lying on his back with one foot sticking over the edge of the bed. I watched his ribs fold and unfold over his breathing. The sun hit the mirror on top of the bureau and glanced off against the ceiling. Beside my bed my pants and shirt were piled on my shoes where I’d taken them off the night before. My clothes were hand-me-downs that Brother had outgrown and passed on to me. His clothes were newer, not so faded as mine.

  I pushed the sheet back and sat up on the side of the bed. Out the window I could see Daddy harnessing the mules in the driveway of the barn. He took the gear off the pegs in front of their stalls and swung it over their backs and buckled it on. Then he led them out into the lot and shook out the checklines and snapped them to the bits. I was too far away to hear the sounds he made. One of the mules kicked at a fly and I waited for the harness to rattle, but there wasn’t any sound. He backed the mules into their places on each side of the wagon tongue and hitched them up. I could hear the wheels joggle when he started out of the lot. Mother went to the back porch, letting the screen door slam, and called something to him. He stopped and answered her, and drove on through the gate.

  Across the hollow that divided our place from Grandpa’s I could see his house and the two barns white in the sun. The back door slammed over there and Grandma crossed the yard and emptied a pan of dishwater over the fence. Grandpa’s hogs came up to see if she’d given them something to eat, and smelled around where she’d thrown the water.

  Grandpa and Uncle Burley were walking out toward the top of the ridge to meet Daddy and the wagon. Uncle Burley’s two coon hounds trotted along at his heels, sad-looking and quiet because they knew he was going to work and not hunting. Grandpa walked in front; he and Uncle Burley weren’t talking to each other. They got to the top of the ridge and stopped. Uncle Burley turned his back to the wind and rolled a cigarette. When Daddy came up they climbed on the wagon and rode out of sight down the other side of the ridge.

  Grandpa’s farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa’s father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed m
oney and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn’t have it at all. Uncle Burley said that was the reason Daddy had bought our farm instead of staying on Grandpa’s. They were the sort of men who couldn’t get along owning the same place.

  Our farm was the old Ellis Place. Daddy had bought it before Brother and I were born, and we still owed money on it; but Daddy said it wouldn’t be long before we’d have it all paid. If he lived we’d own every inch of it, and he said he planned to live. He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

  Uncle Burley didn’t own any land at all. He didn’t own anything to speak of; just his dogs and a couple of guns. In a way he owned an old camp house at the river, but it was Uncle Burley’s only because nobody else wanted it. He’d never let Grandpa or Daddy even talk to him about buying a farm. He said land was worse than a wife; it tied you down, and he didn’t want to be in any place he couldn’t leave. He never did go anyplace much, except fishing and hunting, and sometimes to town on Saturday. But he wanted to feel that he could leave if he took the notion.

  I stood in the patch of sun in front of the window and began putting on my clothes. The day was already hot. Hens were cackling, and a few sparrows fluttered their wings in the dust in front of the barn. I watched our milk cows wade into the pond to drink. Over Grandpa’s ridge I could see where the road came up from the river and went into Port William. At the top of the hill a gravel lane branched off to come back past Grandpa’s gate to our place. On the other side of town the road went down into the bottoms again and followed the river on to the Ohio. I couldn’t see the houses at town, but the white steeple of the church pointed up over the trees and I could make out the weather vane on top. On Sunday mornings we could hear the church bell ringing all the way to our house. And we heard it on Wednesday nights when it rang for prayer meeting.

  Between the hills white fog covered the river and bottoms, and trailed off into the woods along the bluffs. Grandpa remembered when steam-boats were on the river, carrying tobacco and passengers and livestock down to the Ohio and on to Louisville. But now there were only a few towboats pushing bargeloads of sand. The hills on our side of the river were green, and on the other side they were blue. They got bluer farther away.

  Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.

  Mother came to the foot of the stairs and called us to breakfast. I shook Brother awake and waited for him to dress, and then we went down to the kitchen.

  Our mother was sick, and in the afternoons when she’d washed the dinner dishes she had to lie down to rest. Daddy made Brother and me stay out of the house then so it would be quiet. When the weather was good we’d go to the field with Daddy or Uncle Burley, or go swimming, or just wander around looking for things to do. And even though we worried about our mother’s sickness it was good to have the whole afternoon to ourselves without anybody to bother us.

  We went down the hill and into the woods that grew along the hollow between our farm and Grandpa’s. Just enough air was stirring to tilt the leaves without rustling them together, and except for our feet rattling dry leaves on the ground the woods was quiet. We climbed the fence and started on toward the dry streambed at the bottom of the hollow.

  When we’d gone about ten feet on Grandpa’s side of the fence we came to Aunt Mary’s grave. The grave was a shallow trough in the hillside, filled with sticks and leaves. There was no stone to mark it.

  Our Aunt Mary had been buried there a long time ago. It was the first thing anybody remembered about our family, and nobody could remember anything else for a good while after that; we didn’t know how many years it had been since she died.

  Aunt Mary was our great-great-grandfather’s youngest daughter. His name was Jonas Thomasson Coulter. And about the time Aunt Mary was grown he got into an argument with a man named Jeff Ellis who was living on our place then. Jonas thought the line fence between their farms should be built on Jeff Ellis’s side of the hollow, and Jeff Ellis thought it ought to go on Jonas’s side. They squabbled over it for several years, and there was some shooting done by both sides before it was settled.

  While they were in the worst of this fight Aunt Mary took scarlet fever and died. Jonas Thomasson Coulter went down to the hollow and dug a grave where he thought the fence ought to run, and he made the rest of the family bury her in it. His wife never would speak to him or even look at him after that; but it settled the argument over the fence.

  Jeff Ellis was afraid of the dead, and he wouldn’t come close to the grave. So they built the fence ten feet on his side of it. That made Jonas’s farm ten feet wider than even he thought it should have been.

  It didn’t really matter much, because the land in that hollow was steep and ill-natured anyway, and nothing ever grew there but trees and buck bushes. But Uncle Burley said that wouldn’t have bothered Jonas Thomasson Coulter. What he wanted was to own land; it didn’t matter a damn whether it was flat or straight up and down, or whether it would grow tobacco or buck bushes.

  That was all we knew about Grandpa’s grandfather—his name, and how he’d made certain that Grandpa’s line would run where it did. We didn’t know where he came from, or even where he was buried.

  It wasn’t long after they buried Aunt Mary there in the hollow until one of the Ellises saw her ghost. She walked back and forth across her grave on dark nights, carrying a dishpan in one hand and shaking a dish-rag with the other one, the way she’d always looked coming back to the house after she’d emptied the dirty water over the yard fence. From then on a lot of people saw her, our people and different ones of the Ellises. Grandpa said he saw her once when he was a boy. And I thought I’d seen her a time or two, but I wasn’t sure enough to tell anybody but Brother.

  Her ghost walked because she wanted to be buried in the graveyard with the rest of the dead people in our family. But nobody had ever taken the time to dig her up and bury her there. We never even put flowers on her grave.

  The top of the grave was caved in where the dirt had fallen into the hollow places between her bones. I thought her bones had probably rotted too. It would have been hard to dig her up and take her anyplace. We’d waited too long. A big hickory grew up beside the grave, and she was just some earth tangled in the roots. It was strange to think of Aunt Mary being a part of Grandpa’s farm, or maybe a hickory tree.

  We climbed out of the hollow and walked along the edge of the big woods on the river bluff, then crossed the point of the ridge and went down again until we came to the hollow where Grandpa’s spring was. Old Oscar was standing in the shade of the oak trees below the spring.

  Grandpa had raised and trained saddle horses once until he went broke at it. And old Oscar had been his stud. He was a dark chestnut with a narrow white blaze on his face. He’d been beautiful when he was young, and high-spirited. When they were breaking him he kicked Grandpa in the face and left a long, jagged scar across his cheek. But now he was gentle. He was twenty-five years old, and he stayed thin because his teeth were bad. Uncle Burley said he’d finally starve to death because he wouldn’t have enough teeth to eat with. He was blind too, and his eyes were as white as milk. It was as if he’d turned his eyes back into his head to look at whatever it was he thought about.

  Brother and I spoke to him and walked toward his head. He rattled his breath through his nose and trembled until we let him smell our hands and he recognized us. Brother caught him by a hank of his mane and led him over to the spring wall. I broke a switch off a
tree and stripped the leaves; we climbed up on the wall and onto Oscar’s back. We guided him with the switch; when we wanted him to go to the right we jiggled the switch against the left side of his face, and against the right side of his face when we wanted him to go to the left.

  Daddy and Grandpa always said that Oscar would fall down someday and cripple us. But he hardly ever stumbled. Uncle Burley said Oscar knew his way around the farm as well as he knew the inside of his skin. He had it all in his head. He didn’t need to see it. In a way, Oscar walked and grazed and drank in his own mind.

  Brother guided him around the spring and along the side of the hill to the Coulter Branch hollow, and then turned down toward the river. Oscar didn’t like walking in a strange place, but we spoke to him and encouraged him, and before long he got used to the slant of the hill. He walked slower, though, than he did when he was in the pasture, as if afraid the road might drop out from under him or a tree grow up in his way.

  We followed the old wagon road down Coulter Branch to the bottom of the hill and turned upriver past the old Billy Hole landing where Beriah Easterly had his store. The river ran close to the road there. We took the path down through a woods of water maples and elms and sycamores to where Uncle Burley’s fishing shack stood overlooking the river.

  Once the shack had been painted green, but the paint had weathered to a color that was as much blue as green. The trees grew up close around it, and vines had grown over the walls and out along the eaves.

  We got off old Oscar at the camp house and walked the rest of the way to the river. He stood still where we’d stopped him, as if he’d run against a wall and didn’t know how to get around it.