Hannah Coulter Read online

  When I think back to the childhood of my own children now, I remember that the thought of their education was always uppermost. Nathan and I, and I more than Nathan, wanted them to go to school. We wanted them to have all the education they needed or wanted, and yet hovering over that thought always was the possibility that once they were educated they would go away, which, as it turned out, they did. We owed them that choice, and we gave it to them, and it might be hard to argue that we were wrong. But I wonder now, and I wonder it many a time, if the other choice, the choice of coming home, might not have been made clearer.

  Danny and Lyda’s attitude toward education was different from Nathan’s and mine. I can see it clearly now. Their attitude maybe had nothing at all to do with the future. The school was there, and so the children went to it. For a while after the oldest ones started, the school was in Port William, and they went there. And then the Port William school was closed, and the children rode down to Hargrave and back every day on the bus. Danny and Lyda seemed not to mind. They just accepted it as it came. They wanted the children to study and learn and behave themselves reasonably well, but I don’t think they felt any pressure from the future. I don’t think they had the idea that they owed it to the children to send them to college.

  When the children got old enough to quit school, if they wanted to quit, they were allowed to do as their father had done. Of the seven, only Fount, who was the most bookish of the boys, and Rosie finished high school. Every one of them seemed to have a perfect faith in the education they got outside of school, which they didn’t even call “education.” Out of school, they learned what they evidently thought they needed most to know: to keep house, to raise a garden or a crop, to care for livestock, to break a mule or shoe one, to fix a motor and almost anything else, to hunt, fish, trap, preserve a hide, hive a swarm, cook or preserve anything edible, and to take pleasure in such things. To learn things they didn’t know, they asked somebody or they read books. They were a lot like their friends among the Amish.

  Compared to nearly everybody else, the Branches have led a sort of futureless life. They have planned and provided as much as they needed to, but they take little thought for the morrow. They aren’t going any place, they aren’t getting ready to become anything but what they are, and so their lives are not fretful and hankering. And they are all still here, still farming. They are here, and if the world lasts they are going to be here for quite a while. If I had “venture capital” to invest, I think I would invest it in the Branches.

  They farm here and on the Feltner place and on the Jarrat Coulter place and on Danny and Lyda’s place, which is the Coulter home place, and on another place or two. Royal and Coulter have farms of their own, and so do Rosie and her husband. They survive and go on because they like where they are and what they are doing, they aren’t trying to get up in the world, and they produce more than they consume. Except for a manure spreader that Danny bought not long ago from a little Amish factory up in Ohio, I don’t think any of them has ever bought a new piece of equipment. A junk yard is a gold mine to them. If horses or mules will work cheaper than a tractor, then they work horses or mules. They use their cisterns and wells, even if the city water line goes right through their front yards. They catch or shoot or find or grow nearly everything they eat. When they need to, they do a little custom work on the side, they trade and contrive and make do, getting by and prospering both at once. It doesn’t seem to bother them that while they are making crops and meat and timber, other people are making only money that they sometimes don’t even work for.

  Lyda and I have loved each other for a long time, from the time when she looked up to me as an older woman and teacher to the time when I look up to her as my main prop, my help and comfort. We have done so much sewing together, curtains and clothes and slipcovers and such, that she says we have sewed ourselves together. We have cooked and canned and butchered together and helped our men together.

  The number of Lyda’s children and children-in-law and grandchildren has grown past her ability to remember birthdays, and she has to keep a list, but she remembers everything else. She knows the history and the goodnesses and the weaknesses of every one of them, and she knows exactly what to get every one of them on their birthdays and at Christmas.

  I am in need of presents to give on those days too, of course, but I am a lot less certain of what to get. I usually know pretty well what to get for Margaret, and for a while I knew to a certainty what to get for Virgie. Now I don’t know where he is, let alone what he wants or needs. I can guess or suppose with some confidence about Caleb and Alice, but only after I’ve found something that looks more or less appropriate. About Mattie and his family, who are strangers to me even when they are here, I never have a glimmer. It is tempting to solve that problem by sending money, but I know what that would be. It would be abandonment. And so I always send them something.

  I need Lyda for that. She is the best present buyer that ever was. Two or three times a year we make a big shopping trip to Louisville. We always take my car, and Lyda drives.

  “If you drive, we have got to go in my car,” I say. “That makes it fair.”

  “And a lot more likely that we’ll get home,” Lyda says, for their vehicles tend to quit regularly at odd times.

  We take our lists, and we shop in the malls and talk a lot and eat something unusual and have a splendid time. When I get stumped, Lyda will take on my problem. Sooner or later she will point or hold something up and say, “How about this?” And nine times out of ten it will be just the thing.

  Danny gave the same watchful friendliness to Nathan. Heaven will have to pay our debt to them. They have made me glad I have stayed alive, as Burley Coulter used to say.

  Part 3

  20

  The Living

  Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life. Sometimes when I try to remember Nathan, I can’t see him exactly enough. Other times, when I haven’t thought of him, he comes to me unbidden, and I see him more clearly, I think, than ever I did. Am I awake then, or there, or here?

  It is the fall of the year. We have had Thanksgiving. Caleb and Alice were here. And Margaret came, reconciled by now maybe to Virgie’s absence, but not one of us spoke of Virgie. I fixed a big dinner, enough to keep us all in leftovers for a while: a young gobbler that Coulter Branch shot and gave to me, dressing and gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn pudding, hot rolls, a cushaw pie. We sat down to it, the four of us, like stray pieces of several puzzles. Nathan would have asked the blessing, and I should have, I tried to, but that turned out to be a silence I could not speak in. I only sat with my head down, while the others waited for me to say something out loud. And then, to change the subject, I said, “Caleb, take a roll and pass ’em.”

  Soon now it will be Christmas of the two thousandth year of Christ. Lyda and I have done our shopping. I have wrapped and sent off my gifts to the absent ones, and have nearly finished with the others. I have wrapped Virgie’s present and laid it by, in case he reappears. Up in the boys’ old room, where the morning light is strong and I do my sewing, I am making new kitchen curtains for Lyda.

  I find plenty to do. I keep house and cook. In fit weather I take my walks. For company I go to church or drive over to Lyda and Danny’s, or I go and visit an hour or two at Andy and Flora Catlett’s to see what is in their minds. Sometimes they drive over here and sit till bedtime. Sometimes, a haunted old woman, I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift. There is a silence here now that i
s the absence of many voices. In that silence I can no longer bear the television or the radio. Margaret and Lyda insist that I keep the telephone, but I hate to hear it ring. I read books, whose voices don’t disturb the silence. Sometimes I sit still in my chair late into the night, telling over this story to myself.

  I tell it with patience, going over it again and again in order to get it right. Often as my mind moves back and forth over it, I imagine that I am telling it to Andy. That is not hard, for Andy has been listening to me all his life. Andy was in love with me a long time ago, when he was a little boy and I was his uncle’s bride. That ended of course. He is not “in love” with me now. He is an aging man with grandchildren. But I know he loves me. He loves us all, the whole membership, living and dead. He has listened to us all, and has stayed with us, farming in his one-handed fashion over there on Harford Run. We are in each other’s minds. I perfect these thanks by telling them to him.

  As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn’t.

  Nathan was sick, and he knew it, he knew it better than I thought he did, a long time before he consented to go to the doctor. He was wearing out, he said, but he wasn’t only wearing out, he was sick. He lost weight and strength. He got bony and hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. You could see his skull behind his face. He felt bad. He was often almost too ill to get out of bed. But he kept on in his old way, quiet, more pleasant even than usual, staying busy off someplace, mostly by himself.

  Margaret and Lyda and I were after him all the time. “Go to the doctor. You have got to go to the doctor.”

  And Nathan would say, “I’m wearing out. It had to happen, you know.” He was not a doctor-going man.

  Danny was the only one who did not insist. He just smiled his smile. It wasn’t Burley’s smile, for there was no sass in it. It was just the smile by which he kept what he knew to himself. I don’t think anybody has ever asked Danny, “What are you smiling about?”

  Finally we just made Nathan go to the doctor. Margaret and I took him to Hargrave. Our doctor there sent him to a specialist in Louisville. The specialist sent him for tests. And so on. Nathan submitted to it all with patience and quietness, even with good humor, knowing, I think, the diagnosis already.

  The diagnosis was cancer, dangerously advanced and spreading, inoperable. The doctor spoke to Margaret and me, to avoid looking at Nathan. He went into the technical details, speaking of metastasis and naming organs.

  But Nathan was looking at him with a straight, open-eyed look, and the doctor finally felt it. He made himself look back at Nathan, and it was to his credit.

  Nathan said, “Say what you mean. It’s all right.”

  “Mr. Coulter,” the doctor said, “you are gravely ill, or you soon will be. The prognosis is not good, but without prompt treatment you certainly will not live long.”

  Without changing his look or his expression, Nathan nodded.

  The doctor went on to prescribe an intensive course of therapy, starting with radiation. It was a story we all knew, one that has been lived and told too many times in Port William, a bad story.

  But I was surprised when Nathan, without exactly interrupting, stood up. He had come to the end of his submission, though not of his patience or his quietness. He put out his hand, which the doctor a little wonderingly shook. Nathan said, “Thank you, doctor. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

  He went out, and Margaret and I, having no choice, followed.

  I knew then what he had been doing. For a good while after he got sick, he thought he would just work it off the way he always had, he would get well. And then the truth came to him, and he faced it. After that, he was loitering, putting us off, giving himself a chance to be captured by his death before he could be captured by the doctors and the hospitals and the treatments and the tests and the rest of it. When he consented to go to the doctor he was only consenting for the rest of us to be told what he already knew. He was dying.

  We parted with Margaret, who had met us at the doctor’s office. We went home. Nathan hung up his suit, which he would not wear again alive, and got back into his work clothes. He walked up to the barn, and I heard him start the tractor. He put out hay for the cows. It was February, they would be calving soon, and I knew he would look at every one of them. He did his other chores. He filled the woodbox on the back porch. He built up the fires for the evening. And then he sat down in his chair by the stove in the kitchen and picked up the newspaper.

  I was working at the counter by the sink, not daring to turn around. I was brokenhearted, furious, scared, and confused, crying, and determined not to let him see that I was. I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. Why I had started making a cake, I don’t know. It was what my hands had found to do, and I was doing it.

  And was Nathan sitting over there actually reading the paper? Well, I knew he was holding it up and looking at it. For all I know, he may have been reading it. But I knew too that he was thinking of me. My steadfast comfort for fifty years and more had been to know that I was on his mind. Whatever was happening between us, I knew I was on his mind, and that was where I wanted to be. He was thinking of me, I was sure of that, but he had got ahead of me too. He had dealt with what the doctor had told us even before he had gone to the doctor. And now, in a way too late, I was having to deal with it. Looking back, I can see there was something ridiculous about it. There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing. Nathan had seen that. For my sake as much as his own, he was insisting on it. But I was too upset to see it then.

  My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, “Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?”

  I couldn’t turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, “Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.”

  He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

  He lived right on.

  The next morning after breakfast, with the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen windows, we sat on at the table a long time, talking of a number of things, practical things. We set our life before us as it was, and set ourselves before our life as we were, talking of what needed to be done, as we had talked many times.

  And then Nathan changed the tune. Looking straight at me, much as he had looked at the doctor the day before, and taking up that subject again, he said, “I have had a good life, especially the part you know. I have liked it and am thankful for it. I don’t want to end up as a carcass for a bunch of carrion crows, each one taking his piece, and nobody in charge. I don’t want to be worn all to holes like an old shirt no good for rags.”

  I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn’t want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his own life. He didn’t want his death to be the end of a technological process. I nodded.

  He said, “I’m asking this of you, Hannah. I know it’s a lot to ask. I’m sorry.”

  I said, “It’s not what you’re asking of me that I’m sorry for. And you don’t have to be sorry. Do you remember what we promised?”

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bsp; “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  As the opportunities came, I talked with Margaret and Lyda. We tried to foresee needs and make plans. We went back, the three of us, to our doctor down at Hargrave.

  “He doesn’t want to die of a cure,” I said.

  The doctor didn’t want to comment on that. He nodded.

  I said, “I expect there will be pain.” There was already pain, as I knew, but Nathan had not said so, and so I did not.

  “There will be pain,” the doctor said.

  “Will you help us to deal with that?” Margaret asked him.

  The doctor nodded. “I will help you deal with that.”

  “We’re talking about medicine,” Lyda said. “Dope.”

  The doctor smiled and nodded again. “Yes. I will help with that.” And he wrote out a prescription and handed it to me.

  “So you’ll have it when he needs it.”

  Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came. Margaret came out more often than before, but she made her visits casual and not too long. Caleb came when he could. And Danny, I noticed, began showing up every day, maybe not stopping by the house, maybe not seeing Nathan, but keeping an eye on us, watching for what needed to be done and trying to get it done before it could worry Nathan. The spring work was beginning, and so Danny always had reasons to come or to send one of the boys.

  Nathan knew we had pain medicine, and the time came when he needed to ask for it, but usually he would take it only at night. He didn’t like what it did to his mind. It made him feel wrong. He went on as he was able, going about the place and his work, giving it up only as he had to. As he gave it up, Danny quietly took it on.