Hannah Coulter Read online

  One day, sort of laughing, he said, “Hannah, I’d go to the barn and see to things, but I’m afraid if I got there I couldn’t get back.”

  It was April by then, a sunny morning and warm out. I said, “Well, why don’t you go out on the porch and sit a while in the sun?” He went out, and I called Danny to come and see to things at the barn.

  The time soon came when he could not get out of bed. Lyda or Danny began staying at night during the week, Margaret on the weekends. And still Nathan would take the pain medicine only at night. He lay there in the daytime lucidly suffering.

  Way in the night I heard him stir and cry out, not loudly. I got up to see about him.

  I said, “Do you need anything?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  But I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder.

  He said, “I love you too, Hannah.”

  He didn’t last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went.

  Lyda and Andy Catlett and I were with him when he died. It was about suppertime, still daylight, the sun and the wind in the perfect new maple leaves outside the window. A dove called, somewhere off toward town a screen door slammed, and he was gone.

  After the stillness had come and was complete, I telephoned Margaret. She was here in just over an hour with her suitcase packed. She had been expecting the call. Caleb was here early the next morning, having given up on sleep sometime before midnight and come on, leaving Alice to come the next day. He was quiet, steady, helpful, sweet as always, and, I could tell, grieved to the bone.

  It was still the middle of the afternoon, office hours, on the West Coast when I called Mattie. I couldn’t get any living human at his office, and so I left a message on his recording machine: “Mattie, this is your momma. Your dad died a while ago. Call me up.”

  He called back in about an hour. He wanted to come home, he said, he would give anything to be here. But he was too much involved right then in things that depended on him, that he just couldn’t get out of. In fact, he was shortly to leave on a trip to China for a meeting with business people there, an opportunity that might not come again. He was giving me the picture of a man snarled in a tangle, helpless to get free.

  I knew that he didn’t have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine.

  I knew too that it was more than he could bear. He is in a way given over to machines, but he is not a machine himself. Right then, he could not bear the thought of coming back to stand even for a few hours by his dead father in the emptiness he once had filled. He said he would come as soon as he could.

  There was a time when Port William drew its members into itself every Saturday night to shop, trade, talk, court, play, argue, loaf, or whatever else they had to be together in order to do. Now Port William, or what is left of it, is most likely to assemble, not in Port William at all, but in the Tacker Funeral Home in Hargrave. The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don’t recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

  I greeted them all, standing by Nathan’s coffin, with Margaret, Caleb and Alice, Lyda and Danny, the Catlett brothers and their wives standing with me or always somewhere near. The kin and the friends and the neighbors filed past. I took their hands, received their hugs, their smiles, their kind tears, their words of comfort:“I’m sorry, Hannah.”

  “Sorry, Miz Coulter.”

  “We love you both.”

  “There won’t be another one like him.”

  “Anything you need, you let us know.”

  “We’ll miss him.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He was one of the old good ones.”

  “One of them things.”

  And they would pass along to gather in bunches, standing or sitting, in the other rooms, talking, remembering, laughing, as they always do.

  I had been a grieving girl once, and now I was a grieving old woman. I knew how I wanted to appear, and I required myself to appear that way: an old woman whose grief might be supposed but was little to be seen, who was fully capable and in charge, helpful to other grievers, above all useful to herself. The death of an old man is not the same as the death of a young one. It is not wrong, it is not a surprise. It has been a long time coming. You have seen it coming a long time. You know in your own heart what it means, but you must not ask too much of other people.

  And then there was the funeral. The sixth of May. Eleven o’clock in the morning. Not twenty minutes beforehand, Mattie came. He was standing by the coffin, flustered and shaken, everybody looking at him, before I recognized him and could believe it was him. He had flown to Cincinnati, rented a car, dashed down the interstate, and made it barely in time. And he had to hurry back one breath after the preacher said the final amen. I had to think of all it had cost, of all the engines that had run, just to give one man a few minutes of ordinary grief at his dad’s funeral, but I was completely glad to see him. I sat between him and Caleb during the service; it was as it should have been. And then there was the return to Port William, and the brief words and the parting at the grave.

  The kitchen at home was full of brought-in food. It is wonderful how much grief and sympathy in Port William have gone into cooking. Tables were spread and prepared. Everybody who wanted to come came and ate, a lot of people, a lot of commotion and talk. When they had eaten and visited and again spoken their kindnesses, the company scattered, went back to their cars in the yard and the barn lot, and drove off. Mattie was long gone by then, on his way to China, I suppose. Caleb and Alice had a long drive, and I shooed them off. The neighbor women who had come in to lay out the food and do the kitchen work finished up and left. Margaret and Lyda helped me to set the house to rights. Lyda hugged me then and went home, taking food for supper.

  Margaret said, “Momma, can’t I stay with you a few days? I would like to.”

  I said, “No, Margaret. I want you to go. Go home and do the things you need to do. I’m all right.”

  I was telling the truth. I was all right. I was going to live right on.

  After she left, the house slowly filled up with silence. Nathan’s absence came into it and filled it. I suffered my hard joy, I gave my thanks, I cried my cry. And then I turned again to that other world I had taught myself to know, the world that is neither past nor to come, the present world where we are alive together and love keeps us.

  21

  Okinawa

  I married the war twice, as you might say, once in ignorance, once in knowledge. And yet I knew of it only what we suffered of it at home and what I read of it in the newspaper at the time, and later the little I sometimes saw of it on television. But of the actual experience of actual people in the war, I knew little. Of what Nathan had actually known and done and suffered in the fighting on Okinawa, I knew nothing.

  That is maybe not so hard to understand. Our life from the day we married until Nathan died was like a stretched strand. We had our obligations to meet and our work to do, the tasks overlapped and kept on, before the work of one year had ended the work of the next year began. I don’t think Nathan himself dwelled more on the war than he had to, but I think he had to dwell on it. I think he saw the war as in a way the circumstance of the rest of his l
ife. I know he dreamed about it. I know he did not talk about it.

  He did not talk about it, I understood, because it was painful to remember, and for the same reason I did not ask him about it. Now that I have taken the pains to learn something about it, I had better ask if I really wanted to know. I did. I needed to know, but I am not glad to know.

  I learned enough to know why I didn’t learn it any sooner. Nathan was not the only one who was in it, who survived it and came home from it, and did not talk about it. There were several from Port William who went and fought and came home and lived to be old men here, whose memories contained in silence the farthest distances of the world, terrible sights, terrible sufferings. Some of them were heroes. And they said not a word. They stood among us like monuments without inscriptions. They said nothing or said little because we have barely a language for what they knew, and they could not bear the pain of talking of their knowledge in even so poor a language as we have.

  They knew the torment of the whole world at war, that nobody could make or end or escape alone, in which everybody suffered alone. As many who have known it have said of it, war is Hell. It is the outer darkness beyond the reach of love, where people who do not know one another kill one another and there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, where nothing is allowed to be real enough to be spared.

  Hell is a shameful place, and it is hard to speak of what you know of it. It is hard to live in Port William and yet have in mind the blasted and burnt, bloodied and muddy and stinking battlegrounds of Okinawa, hard to live in one place and imagine another. It is hard to live one life and imagine another. But imagination is what is needed. Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

  I was changed by Nathan’s death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember. I began this practice of sitting sometimes long hours into the night, telling over this story, this life, that even when it was only mine was wholly Nathan’s and mine because for the term of this world we were wholly each other’s. We were each other’s chance to live in the room of love where we could be known well enough to be spared. We were each other’s gift.

  But in my telling I pretty soon had to reckon with Nathan’s silence about the war. Out of all I knew of him came this need to know what he had known that I did not know. I went to the library and found books. I found some imperfect and false books, some picture books, for instance, that showed only the enemy dead. And I found some that were true, terrible for being true, brave enough to be terrible enough to be true. I didn’t find out what happened to Nathan himself, of course, for what he knew will not be known again. I found out the sort of thing you would have known if you were a soldier and were there on Okinawa in the spring of 1945 when Easter and the beginning of battle both came on April Fool’s Day.

  You went from an ordinary day in the ordinary world into the world of war, an exploding world where you lived inescapably hour after hour, day after day, killing as you were bidden to do, suffering as you were bidden to do, dying as you were bidden to do. You were there to kill until you were killed. And this would finally seem to be the only world there was.

  It was a world where no place was safe, where you or your friends could be killed in any place at any minute.

  You were living, it seemed, inside a dark cloud filled with lightning and thunder: thousands of tons of explosives, bombs and shells, machine gun and rifle fire. The air was full of death. In some units, sooner or later, everybody was hit.

  You see a friend, shot and dying, lying in the dirt. A medical corpsman is kneeling beside him, tenderly touching his face, making the sign of the cross over him, weeping.

  Mortar shells are coming in as you open a can of food and try to eat. The friend beside you is hit, his head blown off. His brains spatter your clothes and your food. You start to vomit, and you cannot stop.

  You are standing beside your friend. A shell comes in and explodes. Your friend, knocked down, attempts to leap up and discovers that he has no legs. He dies. You cannot forget this.

  You have killed your enemy. You have seen his face as he died, the face of a living young man dying. You cannot forget this. Compassion makes the suffering worse. In the world of war everything makes everything worse.

  Death falls from the sky. It flies in the air. The ground fills with the dead. The rain falls day after day. Mud makes everything worse. It is harder to bring up supplies, harder to move, harder to bring out the wounded and to bury the dead.

  Under fire, you attempt to dig a foxhole, and you dig right into the body of a man, rotten and full of maggots.

  The dead are blasted out of their graves. If you slip on a muddy slope and fall, you get up covered with maggots. They are on your clothes, on your skin, in your pockets.

  Flies are everywhere. Recalling the words of politicians about gallantry and sacrifice, one survivor said, “Only the flies benefited.” The flies spread dysentery. You are wet, muddy, soiled with your own shit, and you live day after day, night after night in the same clothes.

  The battlefield stinks of rotting flesh, excrement, vomit, the smoke of explosives and of everything that will burn.

  Because of the stench and the noise and the never-ending fear, your rations, which are never appetizing, become harder and harder to eat. You are exhausted, and you cannot rest. As the weeks go by, you lose weight, maybe twenty pounds. You know, from looking at your friends, that you no longer look like yourself.

  It goes on without mercy, the fear unending, worst at night. At night the quiet sounds worry you most. At night you never know the origin of a quiet sound. Is it a friend or an enemy? Are you hearing things? Are you losing your mind? You have to make up your mind that you will not lose your mind.

  You find where the enemy buried one of theirs, leaving a green branch in his canteen on his grave. Compassion makes it worse.

  You performed the cruelties that were required and sometimes cruelties that were not, and what would your folks have thought?

  You fought for days without knowing where you were, when the known world consisted of what you could see, the few friends fighting on either side of you, and the unknown enemy in front. You were lost in an enormous fact. The ones of you who were lost in it may never quite have found your way out of it, and nobody outside it would ever quite understand it. How far from home were you? How far beyond the political slogans? You were one of an army of young men fighting to stay alive, and you were fighting an army of young men who finally were fighting only to die. They had to be killed, almost every one of them.

  You knew the terrible loneliness of the thought that your life was worth nothing. You were expendable. You were being spent. Your folks could not have imagined what you were going through, you could not want them to know, you would never tell them.

  What saved it from utter meaninglessness and madness and ruin was the love between you and your friends fighting beside you. For them, you did what you had to do to try to stay alive, to try to keep them alive. For them, you did heroic acts that you did not know were heroic.

  What saved it were the medical corpsmen and stretcher-bearers who went out again and again into the fields of fire to bring away the wounded, who brought something angelic into that Hell of misery and hurt and destruction and death.

  What saved it was the enormous pity that seemed to accumulate in the air over it.

  To read of that battle when you love a man who was in it, that is hard going. I read in wonder, believing and sickened. I read weeping. Because I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Nathan, it all seemed to have happened to him.
r />   You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself over to suffering. You can’t give yourself to love for a soldier without giving yourself to his suffering in war. It is this body of our suffering that Christ was born into, to suffer it Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the suffering we can imagine Easter morning and the peace of God on little earthly homelands such as Port William and the farming villages of Okinawa.

  But Christ’s living unto death in this body of our suffering did not end the suffering. He asked us to end it, but we have not ended it. We suffer the old suffering over and over again. Eventually, in loving, you see that you have given yourself over to the knowledge of suffering in a state of war that is always going on. And you wake in the night to the thought of the hurt and the helpless, the scorned and the cheated, the burnt, the bombed, the shot, the imprisoned, the beaten, the tortured, the maimed, the spit upon, the shit upon.

  The Battle of Okinawa was not a battle only of two armies making war against each other. It was a battle of both armies making war against a place and its people.

  Before that spring, Okinawa had been a place of ancient country villages and farming landscapes of little fields, perfectly cultivated. The people were poor by our standards now but peaceable and courteous, hospitable and kind. They hated violence and had no weapons. They made music and sang when they rested from their work in the fields. It was “a land of song and dance.” The people made beautiful things with their hands: buildings and gardens, weaving and pottery. They had survived conquest, poverty, storms and drouths, disease and hunger, but they had met no calamity like the battle of 1945. It killed 150,000 of them as the fighting drove them out of their homes and they wandered with their children and old people into the fields of fire. They were killed by mistake. Nobody intended to kill them, they were just in the wrong place. It was their own place, but the war had made it wrong.