Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Virgil was the easiest one of us. He tried hard to make his presence among us seem ordinary, and he succeeded well enough. He kept us talking, made us laugh, helped us to feel that we were doing all right. And yet nothing seemed quite ordinary enough to bring us to rest, not even him. He made visits to people and places, taking me with him, and we talked about everything but the future. He wandered down among the stores and loafing places and talked a while with the talkers and wandered back. He spent a good deal of time out on the place with his dad, working at jobs that mostly he would not see finished. The days were separate and suspended, like plants in hanging pots.

  And then on the next-to-last evening we took a picnic, just the two of us, and walked back along the ridges to a place on the farthest one where we could look out over the river valley. It was a place I had never been before.

  In a place like that you don’t need to say much. For a while we just stood and looked. And then Virgil looked at me and smiled and gave me a little pat.

  “I’ll build you a house,” he said.

  I said, “After the war?” I had been afraid to use those words. When I heard myself say them, I was troubled. I hadn’t wanted him to hear my longing.

  But he was looking steadily at me, and his smile didn’t change. He said, “Now too. Now and always. How about here?”

  And I said, “Anywhere with you.”

  There were loose rocks lying around, pieces of old sea bottom, from how long ago? He began picking them up and placing them to mark the corners and doors of a house. As he laid them out, he named the rooms. When he was finished, he brought me in. As the day darkened he set down our basket and I sat down beside it. With dry sticks brought up from the woods, he made a little fire, and we ate our supper beside it.

  Of all the kind things he did for me, that house was the kindest. It was a play house, a dream house sure enough, and yet it was the realest thing of all that time. In it we met and were together on the condition only of loving each other. We lived the dearest minutes of our marriage in that dream house, in the real firelight, under the real stars. And when Virgil went away that time I had something of him with me that I would keep.

  7

  “Missing”

  Virgil disappeared sometime after the Battle of the Bulge. We received the notice—“missing in action,” with the official regret of the Secretary of War—on March 5, 1945. And what did “missing” mean? That nobody knew where he was? Or where his body was? Or that his body no longer existed, was nowhere, had been blown all into pieces or burnt into smoke that the wind blew away?

  It is hard for me to think or speak of the time that came then. I remember it as dark. I can’t remember the sun shining, though I’m sure it must have shone part of the time. I would think sometimes with a black sickness of fear and hopelessness and guilt, “What am I doing alive?” That was when I was sure that “missing” meant “dead.” At other times I would think, “Oh, he has got to be alive. They’ll find him somewhere.” And that was a hope almost as fearful as hopelessness.

  The pleasures that came then had a way of reminding you that they had been pleasures once upon a time, when it seemed that you had a right to them. Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad. You would think, “There seems to have been a time when I deserved such a happiness and needed it, like a day’s pay, and now I have no use for it at all.” How can you be happy, how can you live, when all the things that make you happy grieve you nearly to death?

  A sort of heartbreaking kindness grew then between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. It grew among us all. It was a kindness of doing whatever we could think of that might help or comfort one another. But it was a kindness too of forbearance, of not speaking, of not reminding. And that care of not reminding reminded us, every day, always, of what we felt we could not mention without being overpowered and destroyed. That kindness kept us alive, I think, but it was a hardship too. Sometimes I would have to go to be by myself, in my room or outdoors somewhere, just to get away from it.

  Kindness kept us alive. It made us think of each other. I could think of myself, of course, with no trouble at all. Justly enough, I could feel sorry for myself. I was a young wife who had been married going on four years, and I had not yet lived a full year with my husband. And now perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, my husband was dead. Perhaps, possibly, very likely, almost certainly, I was a widow with child by a man now dead, and this child of my love living inside me had become half an orphan before it could be born.

  By kindness I was coming to understand what it meant to be in love with Virgil. He and I had been, we were, we are—for there is no escape—in love together. I went into love with Virgil, and of course we were not the only ones there. To be in love with Virgil was to be there, in love, with his parents, his family, his place, his baby. When he became lost to our living love in this world, by knowing what it meant to me I couldn’t help knowing what it meant to the others. That was our kindness. It saved us, but it was hard to bear.

  We knew, always, more than we said. One of us lying awake in the night would know that the others probably were lying awake too, but nobody ever said so. In the daytime it seemed to me that we were all kept standing upright, balanced ever so delicately, by our kind silence. Sometimes it seemed that one word, one outcry, would flatten us all.

  The thought that Virgil was dead didn’t come upon us suddenly, like “news.” It just wore itself deeper and deeper into us day by day.

  The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil’s life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away.

  I was young enough for life to be generous with me. The husband I lost in the war, as it turned out, was not to be my only husband. The war that Virgil died in Nathan survived and came home from. But Mr. Feltner lost his only son, his only begotten son. I would watch him go out to his work every day, and I would see that he was going alone, without Virgil who once had gone with him, and I would know that it was going to be that way for him for all the rest of his days.

  I would watch Mrs. Feltner when the morning was ending and dinnertime was coming, and she would say what she didn’t need to say but always said, “Nettie, put the biscuits in” or “Start the hoecake, Net,” and I would know that when two for so long had been expected, now only one would arrive. And this would not change for her either for as long as she would live.

  And yet Mr. Feltner would come in smiling. They would greet each other, old lovers, old friends, happy to see each other. He would say hello to Nettie. He would pass some little joke or compliment to me, and I would try to have something to say back. He would go to the sink and wash his hands, and we would sit down to our meal.

  Love held us. Kindness held us. We were suffering what we were living by.

  I began to know my story then. Like everybody’s, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

  Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after. I was in it a long time with Nathan. I am still in it with him. And what about Virgil? Once, we too went in and were together i
n that room. And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.

  And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.

  All through that bad time, when Virgil’s absence was wearing into us, when “missing” kept renaming itself more and more insistently as “dead” and “lost forever,” I was yet grateful. Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark.

  I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

  Mr. and Mrs. Feltner were a refuge to me. They were a shelter. They just freely gave me whatever they had that they could see I needed. They were always trying to fill the blank that they felt around me. When my pains began on the night of the sixteenth of May, the three of us rode together down to the hospital in Hargrave, Mr. Feltner driving the old car somehow gently, as if the future of the whole world rode in it. They stayed with me through the night, and were there to see the baby almost as soon as she was born. I named her Margaret after Mrs. Feltner, as I thought Virgil would have wanted to do, and as I wanted to do.

  When he heard about the baby, my father came. Since Grandmam’s death, he had stayed on the old place, farming it now as the tenant of the heirs, namely himself and his brothers and sisters, he being one of six. The times were good for farming then, for a little while, but I knew the farm was running down, for its half a dozen new owners could not agree on much of anything, and would spend almost nothing on upkeep and repairs. Ivy was in charge by then, to the extent that anybody was. As a farmer, my father had declined from his mother’s tenant to his wife’s hand. And his brothers and sisters, who had five different opinions about everything, were afraid of Ivy and blamed my father for whatever they thought was wrong.

  Maybe remembering Grandmam’s judgment in such matters, he left his latest old car down in front of Jayber Crow’s barber shop and walked up to the house, where he presented himself at the back door. Mrs. Feltner of course welcomed him as she would have welcomed a wise man from the east and brought him to the bedroom where I was lying with the baby and placed a chair for him by the bed.

  He was wearing what always passed with him for his Sunday best—a clean pair of bib overalls, a clean work shirt buttoned at the neck, and the jacket of the brown suit he had bought to marry my mother in. He laid his old best felt hat on the floor as carefully as if it had been made of glass. He was fifty-three years old.

  Over the years he seemed to have shrunk, trying to make himself invisible to Ivy, or maybe to God. The jacket had begun to look too big for him. I knew he had come in secret. Ivy didn’t know where he was.

  I told him my news and asked for his. Elvin and Allen were long gone by then, but I asked about them.

  They were living up somewhere about Lexington, he said. Ivy didn’t hear from them much. He reckoned they were all right.

  And how was Ivy?

  Ivy was fine. She missed her boys, and was suffering some from the rheumatism, but she was fine.

  He too, he said, was fine.

  I handed him the baby. “This is Margaret, your granddaughter,” I said.

  He took her and held her awkwardly and gently on his lap and looked down at her a long time, unable to speak.

  Almost from her first day we called her “Little Margaret.” She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry. And I was not the only one. I saw, and pretended I didn’t see, Mrs. Feltner and Bess and Nettie Banion crying as they rocked her in their arms. We were all thinking, “Poor little child! Where’s her daddy?”

  Uncle Jack Beechum had left his farm by then and moved into the old hotel in Port William. At the oddest times, and sometimes to Mrs. Feltner’s exasperation, he would come to visit me. He would sit by my bed or my chair, watching over me and the baby without exactly looking at us, saying little. He loved me first on Virgil’s account, as I knew, but then on my own and the baby’s. This was the tenderness of an old man whose love had abided the desire for women for a long time, and had known happiness and hardship and longing and satisfaction and death and grief, and had somehow become innocent again. It was a love almost not of this world, and yet entirely of it. He brought me presents—little sacks of penny candy with their necks twisted shut, or little bouquets from neighbors’ flower beds to which he helped himself.

  But he himself, though he would not have thought it, was the best present. He had no small talk and few of what are called social graces. He had a kind of courtesy that required few words, and with me a gentleness that was as deliberate and forceful as his bouquets of stolen flowers so roughly broken off. He would say, “Ay Lord, honey, you’re all right!” Or: “Here’s some flowers I brought you, pretty thing.” He knew that I was living in loss, that the baby had been born into loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil’s absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

  And he needed her, I think. We all needed her. Even Ernest Finley, an unhappy man, would lean on his crutches and look at her and smile. We didn’t know how much we needed her until she came among us, and then we knew. She came to us like love between lovers, the answer to a need we would not have had if she hadn’t come.

  She was needed, and then there she was among us, growing and changing every day, a living little girl, one of us. At first she was only present, enclosed mostly in her own small being. And then, we could see it happening, she began to look out of her eyes. She began to see the light from the windows. She began to see us. She began to know us. She began to look at us and smile, as if greeting us from a world we did not know or had forgotten. She made sounds at first that were just sounds, and then she made sounds that were answers and sounds that were calls.

  To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength—that changed me. My heart, which seemed to have had only loss and grief in it before, now had joy in it also. I felt myself setting out with that “Little Margaret” into the world and into her life.

  She would wake up hungry in the night where she slept in her basket by my bed. I would turn on the light, change her diaper, and then turn the light off. The rest I did in the dark, by feeling. I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand. And the next thing I knew I would be waking up to daylight in the room and Little Margaret still sleeping in my arms.

  There came a time, long before she could talk, when we knew that she knew her name. There came a time when she began to return our hugs and kisses. There came a time when she began to play, and when Mr. Feltner began to play with her. Mrs. Feltner was a devoted grandmother, but she didn’t play. Mr. Feltner was the one who played. When he was in the house and Little Margaret wasn’t asleep, he would have her on his lap, teaching her to play patty-cake while she laughed and held to his thumbs. He recited rhymes to her:Juber this and Juber that,

  Juber skint a yeller cat.

  And he sang to her:Old hound dog stole a middlin’

  Many long years ago.

  And:Did you ever see a spider on the wall,

  A spider on the wall,

  A spider on the wall?

  Did you ever
see a spider on the wall,

  A spid—er—on—the—wall?

  She could sing that spider song before she could talk.

  Soon enough she could talk, and walk, and run, and feed herself after a fashion, and have opinions, and admire her pretty clothes, and make demands. Uncle Jack was careful not to impose himself on her, for fear of offending her, and so she imposed herself on him. She would stand in front of him until he leaned down from his bigness and smiled at her and called her “pretty thing.” And she would lift her arms to him.

  As if all of a sudden, we couldn’t imagine the world without her. She was a part of it, as much as we were, as much as Port William itself was.

  Did we spoil her? I can honestly say that I at least didn’t spoil her, I was so afraid that she would be a bother to her grandparents and not deserve their love. I sort of knew that she didn’t have to deserve their love, but I was strict with her. Mrs. Feltner, for one, thought I was too strict, and eventually I saw that she was right.

  She said to me one day when I was correcting Little Margaret for something that didn’t much matter, “Honey, there are some things it’s just better not to see.”

  Another time, when I had said, “I don’t want to spoil her,” Mrs. Feltner said, “Oh, Hannah, I always like to see ’em spoiled a little bit. It means somebody loves ’em.”

  Soon enough Little Margaret was three years old, one of us, and Virgil was three years gone.

  After we lost Virgil, I grieved for our unknowing love, and for the life we might have lived if we had been allowed to live it. I so much wanted what was lost. It had turned out to be only a hopeless hope, a dream, but I wanted it.

  Grieved as I was, half destroyed as I sometimes felt myself to be, I didn’t get mad about Virgil’s death. Who was there to get mad at? It would be like getting mad at the world, or at God. What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say. Was Virgil a hero? In his dying was he willing to die, or glad to sacrifice his life? Is the life and freedom of the living a satisfactory payment to the dead in war for their dying? Would Virgil think so? I have imagined that he would. But I don’t know. Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever “missing”? Who can speak for a young man gone clean out of the world, whose body was maybe blown all to nothing, in the midst of terrible fear or pain, in the midst of his last prayer?