Hannah Coulter Read online

  By a long detour through the hell that humans have learned to make, Nathan had come home. He came back to Port William and to me, to the home and household we made, to his family and friends, to our children yet to be born. And of course he came back to loss, to the absence of those who did not come back, and of those who would leave.

  There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be. After he came home, I think Nathan tried to make such a place, and in his unspeaking way to live such a life. Maybe by 1948 I knew already, or I knew before long, that before he went to the army he had been a hunter. After he came home, he gave away his guns. We never had a gun in our house.

  In the early spring of 1948, Nathan bought the old Cuthbert place that fronted on the Sand Ripple Road and joined the Feltner place at the back. There were practical reasons for this. Jarrat’s farm, which adjoined the Coulter home place, was small, only about seventy-five acres, much of it wooded slopes that weren’t farmable. The home place, where Burley lived, was about three times as big, but its future was put into question by Burley’s irregular family life and by the existence of his son, Danny Branch, who was then sixteen years old.

  So Nathan bought the Cuthbert place, because it was for sale and was what he could afford. That is, he had enough in savings to get the title, a mortgage, and an old rundown farm. He had bought a lot of work. The Cuthbert place had been owned jointly by three generations of Cuthbert heirs who had never been able to agree to sell it but had simply subdivided their interest in it as their numbers increased. There were people in various distant places who every year received one thirty-fourth of half of whatever income the place brought. I had written some of those checks myself when I worked for Wheeler Catlett, who was the executor of the estate. During the war, except for two or three plowlands, the place had been almost abandoned. There were still a few old rock fences on it that were in fair shape. The wire fences were just remnants and patches. Nothing had been repaired or painted for years. Most of the buildings, including the house, were fixable, but whoever was going to fix them was going to have to hurry. There were some wide, well-lying ridges on it, in some places gullied and overgrown, in others not so bad. There were some fine old sugar maples around the house.

  Port William had ideas, of course, about what could be done with such a place, and about what Nathan would do with it, and Port William discussed these matters thoroughly, as it always did. It was also mystified:“Do you reckon he’s going to live there by himself?”

  “It ain’t good for a man to be alone.”

  “How long do you reckon a family can run on bachelors?”

  “Well, Burley ain’t exactly a bachelor.”

  “Well, Nathan ain’t exactly Burley, either.”

  “What do you reckon he’s going to do for a woman?”

  I knew pretty well what he was planning to do for a woman, but it was not easy knowing. In my heart, I wanted to be the woman, but I had a lot to give up before I could be. So did Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

  I knew they were worrying about me. People know more about each other than what they tell each other, and I knew that certain things were obvious. For three years I had led the life almost of an old woman. I had no life beyond the house and the place and the church and the family visits I made with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. For a long time I didn’t need my own life as a young woman. When I began again to feel such a need, fear made it easy to push aside. I feared for myself, and I feared too for Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. Little Margaret was as much a part of their lives as she was of mine. How could I think of parting from them, of putting asunder what had for so long belonged together? I could let my thoughts go to Nathan, but I couldn’t think of going to him myself. Mr. and Mrs. Feltner had been parents and friends to me, a refuge in time of trouble. What could I tell them?

  One day when Mr. Feltner came in early for dinner, he washed his hands and came on into the living room where I was. I was embroidering a row of flowers across the bodice of a new Sunday dress I had made for Little Margaret. It was close work and I didn’t look up. I heard his footsteps. They paused when he came into the room and saw me, and then they came on. He stopped by my chair. He leaned down and laid his hand on my shoulder and made me look up at him. He had tears in his eyes. For a minute we just looked at each other, and then as if in answer to something I had said, or in answer to what he knew I wanted to say, he said, “I know. I know. But, my good girl, you have got to live.”

  He had given me permission. But it was more than that. It was an instruction. It was his wish. I knew he spoke for Mrs. Feltner too. They weren’t holding me. They didn’t want fear to hold me, for myself or for them. They hadn’t known what to do. But now they saw that a life apart from theirs was asking for me. If I wanted it, they wanted me to have it. But they meant more than that. Mr. Feltner was telling me, at his cost, for my sake, what Grandmam had told me eight years before: “You need to go.”

  And so he raised the dare. If I hadn’t cared for Nathan, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. But I did care, and it did matter. The only thing standing now between Nathan and what he wanted was this scared woman looking the other way. To turn to Nathan, to look to him, would be to give my life to the world again. A burnt child shuns the fire. But now I had the feeling that I was expected. I would have to go. I wanted to go. But even sorrow has its pride. Even desire does.

  Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it’s only then that things can work themselves out. The next chance Nathan caught, he said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Well, start talking,” I said.

  “Not here.”

  “Where?”

  “Over at the Cuthbert place. Up on the ridge there. Behind the house.”

  “When?”

  “Late this evening. After supper.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Because I needed to walk and to be alone, I often made a quiet wander after supper. I like that time of day. I like to see the country lying still under the changing light and the coming darkness.

  It wasn’t far, half a mile maybe, back across the ridges toward the opening of the river valley that I could see from the highest ground. At the ramshackle line fence I stepped over from a good farm, well kept for a long time, onto a poor place covered with the marks and signs of neglect. I had to pick my way then, following old grazing paths among young cedar and redbud and locust trees and patches of sumac and blackberry briars. But I knew where the old house was and the ridge behind it, and my winding way took me there. The sun was down. As I walked, the moist evening air bore up around me the good weedy smell of the old pasture.

  Nathan was standing among some cedars about as tall as he was. He had heard me coming, or he had known the direction the overgrowth would force me to come from, if I came, for he was facing me. He was standing as quietly as the trees. I was close to him before I saw him, and then I stopped.

  It would be a while before either of us moved. But now I was facing him. We were looking straight at each other. I felt a shiver go over me, but I didn’t move. I could have cried, but I didn’t cry. I had not returned his look before. And now he smiled and nodded, as if to thank me.

  And then we looked away from each other. Nathan turned a little and we looked down the slope toward the paintless old house and barns and outbuildings. It was getting dark.

  Finally he said, “Well, what would you call this?”

  “I guess,” I said, “you’d still have to call it a farm.”

  He said, “It’ll never be what it was. It could be better than it is.”

  We had a little conversation then about the place, what it needed, what could be done, what it offered.

  I said, “It, plus what you see in it, plus what you want from it, could be a farm.”

  He turned and looked at me again. I could hardly see his eyes, but I felt his look.

  He said, “It�
��s not the Feltner place,” and he meant it as a question. He was asking if I would marry him, and I trembled.

  “I wasn’t born on the Feltner place,” I said. “I was born on such a place as this.”

  We were looking at each other, though we could barely see. It was almost dark. But to know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light. When a woman and a man give themselves to each other, they have a light between them that nobody but them can see. It doesn’t shine outward into time. They see only each other and what is between them. If it’s only an old run-down, overgrown, disregarded farm they have between them, they see that and they see each other, though everything else is dark.

  “I know you’re afraid,” he said. “And so am I. But can you see a life here?”

  I went to him then, and he hugged me. We didn’t kiss, not then, not yet. I laid my cheek against him and smelled the smell of his clean shirt and, within it, the smell of him, himself. I put my arms around him then and hugged him as tight as I could. Now that this thing that he had wanted to happen had finally started to happen, maybe he thought I was never going to turn him loose. I wanted to hold and protect and save him forever.

  9

  Generosity

  Nathan and I turned away from the war and saw the future shining before us. The future we faced was no more than the old Cuthbert place, but it shone before us. After all that had happened, I was almost surprised to see that I was still a young woman. I was twenty-six. Nathan was twenty-four. We were young and strong and full of desire. When I looked with Nathan at his place, soon to be ours, we saw it as it was and as it might be. We knew what we would ask of it. We were ready for what it would ask of us.

  One big problem remained. It was my problem, and I felt helpless to solve it. Our plans had to be told. If we were going to do what we wanted to do, we were going to have to say what we wanted. Port William no doubt already had a good idea what we were up to and was waiting to be told, but the people who needed to be told first were Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

  I couldn’t do it. I knew they probably already guessed, but I couldn’t see myself telling them. I couldn’t imagine the words. For me to tell them, it seemed like, would be to agree somehow to their loss. It would be as if to say that their loss, from now on, would be only theirs, not mine.

  I told Nathan, “I can’t. I just can’t. I’m sorry. What am I going to do? Run away and write them a letter?”

  Nathan said, “You don’t have to do anything.”

  That same evening after supper he found Mr. Feltner where he knew to look for him—out on the back porch, smoking a cigar.

  “Hello, Nathan,” Mr. Feltner said. “Come and sit down.”

  Nathan stepped up onto the porch and sat beside him. It was a warm summer evening and clear. The light was going to last a long time. Mrs. Feltner and I were in the kitchen with Little Margaret, finishing up after supper. We were making enough noise, and talking away as we usually did when we worked together. We didn’t know Nathan was on the place.

  Out on the porch, they made the usual comments about the work and the weather.

  And then Nathan said, “Mr. Feltner, Hannah and I have been talking. We want to get married. I want to make it right with you.”

  Mr. Feltner looked at the end of his cigar and thought for the proper words. This wasn’t a conversation that went very fast. He said, “It’s Hannah’s choice, Nathan. It’s up to her. I will tell you only what you know. She is a daughter to us.”

  Then Nathan thought about what he should say, and he said, “I wouldn’t ever want her to be any less a daughter to you than she is now, or Little Margaret any less a granddaughter.”

  Mr. Feltner thought again with his head down, and then he looked at Nathan. He said, “If she loves you, and you love her, you’ll be as welcome to us as you can be.”

  Nathan said no more. To change the subject Mr. Feltner said, “Well, I’m going to gain a better neighbor in this. I reckon you’ll keep the line fence fixed.” And he laughed. The Cuthbert half of the line fence had been a nuisance to him almost all his life.

  “I’ll fix the fence,” Nathan said.

  Mr. Feltner got up and went to the kitchen door and called in, “Ladies, we’ve got company. Come on out.”

  Nathan stood up as we came out. Mr. Feltner reached for Mrs. Feltner’s hand and smiled at her. He said, “Margaret, Hannah and Nathan are going to get married. Nathan has come to ask for our blessing.”

  “Oh, bless you!” Mrs. Feltner said, looking at us both, and laughing to keep from crying. “Oh, bless your dear hearts!”

  And so our tale was told, no longer a secret from anybody. Some in Port William became more interested than before. Some, now that they knew for certain, turned their attention to things they weren’t so sure about.

  The next day was Sunday. In the afternoon Nathan came and got me, and we went to look at the old house. Until then I had seen it only from a distance. Though he didn’t say so, I knew Nathan was worrying. What was I going to think of it? As usual when there was nothing to say, he didn’t say anything.

  We turned down the Sand Ripple road, after half a mile or so crossed the creek on a board bridge, and after about the same distance again turned into the lane to the Cuthbert place. We re-crossed the creek and followed the lane as it curved around and up the slope to the house.

  The house with its shady yard stood in a swag of the slope, well sheltered from the north wind by the ridge behind it, and not far from the walled spring that once had supplied its water. The yard had not been mowed for at least a year. There was no path to the house. The long blades and dead stems of bluegrass lay in mats and tufts under the weeds and several big stalks of burdock. But a patch of day lilies was in bloom along the fence, and an old small-flowered pink rambler rose was blooming in a heap by the gate where we got out of the car.

  Nathan unwired the gate. We picked our way across the yard, went up onto the back porch, pushed open the door that maybe never had been locked, and went into the kitchen. The air was musty and hot. The house was full of the stale smell of people long gone and the most complete silence. Going into it was a little like going back to the house of a lonely old widow after her funeral. We felt like we ought to be quiet, and we went quietly into every room. We looked at everything and spoke of what we saw in low voices, as if afraid of being overheard.

  It was a house like a lot of houses around Port William: four rooms downstairs, two upstairs, the front rooms downstairs and the rooms above divided by narrow hallways, the rear slant of the roof much longer than the front, the roof in front divided by a gable, a narrow strip of porch along the back, a wider one in front.

  In structure the house was tight and sound. It was straight, square, level, and plumb. The rock foundation was solid. The roof would last another ten years. But the marks of hard use and neglect were everywhere. A few useless old sticks of furniture were lying about. The wallpaper sagged or hung in shreds where the winter thaws had sweated it loose. A window was broken. Tribes of wasps and mud daubers had come in to keep house. A pair of wrens were nesting in a gallon bucket on the mantelpiece in the living room. Everything was covered with dirt and dust. There was a dead chimney swift on the kitchen floor. The electric line had come down the creek a few years before, and the house was wired. There was no plumbing. For heat there were fireplaces in the front rooms and stovepipe holes in the chimneys. I would be starting out here at about where I had left off at Grandmam’s. Except that here we would have electricity. And this was a better house.

  We went into every room and out onto the front porch that had a fine outlook over the narrow little valley of Sand Ripple, and then back through the house and out again onto the back porch. We stood and looked at the old cellar at the end of the porch, the well, the smokehouse and henhouse, the privy leaning like the tower of Pisa out by the garden fence, the two old barns, the corncrib, the buggy shed.

 
So far, we had spoken only of what we saw. But now Nathan said, “Well, it’s fixable, don’t you think so?”

  I said, “Of course it is. It’s a good house. It’s our house.”

  He said, “Here’s what I’ve thought. We’ll make it right. We can take all the time we need. We’ll go ahead and make at least the downstairs just the way you want it, and then we can get married.”

  It didn’t take me anything like a minute to think about that. I said, “No. Let’s go ahead. Let’s don’t wait.”

  That was what we did, and I never was the least bit sorry. Nathan was glad too. We didn’t care what we would have to put up with, as long as we could be together. “We’ll camp in it while we work on it,” I said. “We’ll tell Little Margaret we’re camping out. She’ll love that.”

  We tore and scraped away the loose wallpaper, got rid of the junk and the broken glass, swept and mopped and swept and mopped again. Nathan reglazed the broken sash, and I washed all the windows. We went to Hargrave and bought a new cooking stove and a refrigerator, and that was about the end of our buying for that year. The rest of the household stuff we needed we got out of attics or storerooms at Burley’s and Jarrat’s and the Feltners’. We furnished three downstairs rooms with what we needed to cook, eat, wash, sleep, and sit down. And then we got married and moved in.

  Those were fine days. Everything we did seemed to start something that was going to go on and on. I’ll never forget the feeling it gave me just to make this house clean, to fill it with fresh air and the good smell of soapy water, to wash the dingy windows and see the rooms fill with light, to get here one morning and find that Nathan had mowed the yard, sparing the day lilies and the rambler rose. I cut a few blossoms and stuck them in a jar of water in the living room.