Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  What I know is this. Virgil loved his life. He loved me. He loved his family. He did not want to die. He wanted to come home and live with me and raise a family, and farm with his dad. He knew we were going to have a baby. He never knew he had a daughter. He never knew her name.

  I don’t mean to be quarrelsome, but the dead are helpless. I was the mother of a helpless baby, and the wife of a dead man who was just as helpless. The living must protect the dead. Their lives made the meaning of their deaths, and that is the meaning their deaths ought to have. I hated for Virgil’s death to be made official. I hated for it to be a government property or a public thing. I felt my grief for him made his death his own. My grief was the last meaning of his life in this world. And so I kept my grief. For a long time I couldn’t give it up.

  There have been times, then and later too, when I thought I could cry forever. But I haven’t done it. There was war and rumors of war. “There was war in Heaven once,” as Aunt Fanny would sometimes remind us. But there was something else too.

  The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones. Little Margaret was calling me into life. A little ahead of me in time still, Nathan would be calling me into life.

  At first, as the months went by, it was shameful to me when I would realize that without my consent, almost without my knowledge, something had made me happy. And then I learned to think, when those times would come, “Well, go ahead. If you’re happy, then be happy.” No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn’t have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want. And so, unknowingly, I was being prepared for Nathan and for my life with him, when that time would come.

  Virgil was missing, and nobody ever found him or learned what happened to him. And the girl I was when I fell in love with him and married him began to be missing too, becoming a memory along with him. I was changing, and the world was changing. I was going on into time, where Virgil no longer was. Now, looking back after so many years, I still can recognize that young couple, I know them well, and I pity them for their lost life. But I am no longer one of them. Those lovers fled away a long time ago.

  Part 2

  8

  Nathan

  I need to tell about my people in their grief. I don’t think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. We know that every night, war or no war, there are people lying awake grieving, and every morning there are people waking up to absences that never will be filled. But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is “Fine.” There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to “How are you?” is “Fine.”

  The thing you have most dreaded has happened at last. The worst thing you might have expected has happened, and you didn’t expect it. You have grown old and ill, and most of those you have loved are dead or gone away. Even so:

  “How’re you?”

  “Fine. How’re you?”

  “Fine.”

  There is always some shame and fear in this, I think, shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief, and fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else’s. But this is a kind of courtesy too and a kind of honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary. And there is something else: an honoring of the solitude in which the grief you have to bear will have to be borne. Should you fall on your neighbor’s shoulder and weep in the midst of work? Should you go to the store with tears on your face? No. You are fine.

  And yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end. Once in a while we hear it sung out in a hymn, when every throat seems suddenly widened with love and a common longing:In the sweet by and by,

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  We all know what that beautiful shore is. It is Port William with all its loved ones come home alive.

  My life with Virgil was a romance, because it never had a chance to become anything else. We were a courting couple, and then we were newlyweds in the shadow of war, and then the war separated us forever. We became only a pretty memory, and now I am the last of its rememberers. Oh, maybe the Catlett boys still remember, but they were too young then to have remembered much. Andy, I hope you do remember, at least a little.

  My life with Nathan turned out to be a long life, an actual marriage, with trouble in it. I am not complaining. Troubles came, as they were bound to do, as the promise we made had warned us that they would. I can remember the troubles and speak of them, but not to complain. I am beginning again to speak of my gratitude.

  By the time Virgil went into the army, Mr. Feltner and Joe Banion were getting old. Jarrat and Burley Coulter began raising most of Mr. Feltner’s crops on the shares, and it was a good thing. He needed their help. He needed their company too. Their losses in the war had made them close, and especially a friendship grew between Mr. Feltner and Burley that was dear and necessary to them.

  Jarrat and Burley would often be at work on the Feltner place, and after he was discharged and came home, Nathan would be with them. I was about to say that at first he was nothing to me, but that is not quite right. In Port William, back then, nobody was exactly nothing to anybody. I knew Nathan had been in the war, in the hard fighting in the Pacific at the last. I knew he had lost his brother in the war, and now he had come home to farm with his father and his uncle.

  I knew too that the Coulter family had come to a strange pass, having dwindled to a widower and two bachelors, living in two houses on adjoining farms, Burley and Nathan in one and Jarrat alone in the other. Jarrat had lived alone ever since the death of his wife when the boys were young, because that was the way it suited him to live. Burley, according to gossip, had a sweetheart, a might-as-well-be-wife, Kate Helen Branch, and a said-to-be son by her, Danny Branch, but Burley didn’t live with them or they with him. What Nathan was doing for company, female or otherwise, I didn’t know, and for a long time I didn’t wonder. What he was doing was picking up girls at the Rosebud Cafe down at Hargrave, as lonely Port William men have often done. I didn’t know it then, and if I had I wouldn’t have cared. Well, I don’t care yet.

  He was not nothing to me, but he didn’t matter to me either.

  But sometimes my grief for Virgil would become mingled with grief for myself. I didn’t want to be selfish. In the midst of so much grief, mine and other people’s, I feared the guilt of wanting anything for myself. I had little Margaret to look after and think about and enjoy. Though I had quit working away from home, I was busy every day about the place with Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion. So much was a plenty. My conscience told me it was enough and more than enough. And yet time didn’t stop, life didn’t stop, we learned to believe that “missing” had to mean “dead,” month after month separated us from the last we would ever know of Virgil, and in time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.


  That was how Nathan began to matter to me. For a long time after he was home, I looked on him just as a fixture of the life of Port William as it had reshaped itself after the war. But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you. It took a while. Nathan was a quiet man and not a forward one. To me, he was somebody off on the edge of things, which seemed to content him well enough. But I began to know him. When the men would be working together, I would sometimes carry water to them, or sometimes even dinner if they were working far from the house. Or we would be feeding a harvest crew, and he would be with them. He became a presence to me. It was his presence that gave me the feeling that I was going to waste.

  Maybe that was because he seemed so clearly to be going to waste himself. Maybe he wasn’t settled at home yet, but it seemed he was just there, just doing whatever he needed to do, which I guessed was the way he had been and done in the army. By then, of course, I knew about the Rosebud girls. One reason nobody could be nothing to you in Port William in those days was that you couldn’t help knowing at least something about everybody. I was a little older than Nathan—two years, a long time when you are young—and maybe I felt sort of motherly toward him. He clearly wasn’t a settled man or a very happy one. Maybe it didn’t occur to me that I was going to waste because he thought I was. What I thought was, “He needs a woman. He needs a woman of his own. He needs a wife.” This seemed merely what anybody would have thought, looking at Nathan as he was then. And in fact, one day when we were finishing up in the kitchen after feeding dinner to the Coulters and some others, Mrs. Feltner said, “I just don’t feel like Nathan’s as happy as he ought to be. What he needs is a wife.”

  Nettie Banion said, “Yessum, he does. He needs to buy him some meat and bring it home!”

  I could say he gradually assumed a sort of standing in my eyes. He had the hardiness of his father and uncle, their indifference to bad weather, and their sufferance of whatever work or difficulty had come or would come. He was absolutely loyal to them. When they were at work, he was. He was a fine hand. I knew that Mr. Feltner respected him. And young as he was, he clearly had a love of farming that was his own. He was quiet, he never put himself forward, but he was there. You couldn’t not notice him. And just as slowly as he became a presence to me, I became aware that I was present to him. I knew it by the way he was looking at me.

  Nathan was a beautiful man. In my heart and memory he will always be beautiful, but in those days nobody could have missed it. In his quietness and in other ways, he took after his father, but in his looks he resembled Burley. Looking at Nathan, you could imagine how Burley had looked as a young man. He wasn’t overly tall, but he was broadshouldered and strongly made without looking in any way thick. He was as clean cut as a sapling. He wore his clothes and ate and drank in a way that told you he would be offended by anything slovenly.

  But his best beauty was in his face, mostly in his eyes. From the time I was first aware of him, I never caught him sneaking a look. He looked at you with a look that was entirely direct, entirely clear. His look said, “Here I am, as I am, like it or not.” There was no apology in his look and no plea, but there was purpose. When he began to look at me with purpose, I felt myself beginning to change. It was not a look a woman would want to look back at unless she was ready to take off her clothes. I was aware of that look a long time before I was ready to look back. I knew that when I did I would be a goner. We both would be. We would be given over to a time that would be ours together, and we could not know what it would be.

  When I finally did look back at him, it was lovely beyond the telling of this world, and it was almost terrible. After that, we were going into the dark. We understood, and we were scared, and I wanted nothing more than to go into the dark with him.

  I was beautiful in those days myself, as I believe I can admit now that it no longer matters. A woman doesn’t learn she is beautiful by looking in a mirror, which about any woman is apt to do from time to time, but that is only wishing. She learns it so that she actually knows it from men. The way they look at her makes a sort of glimmer she walks in. That tells her. It changes the way she walks too. But now I was a mother and a widow. It had been a longish while since I had thought of being beautiful, but Nathan’s looks were reminding me that I was.

  To know that Nathan was thinking such thoughts mattered to me. It mattered to me whether or not I was willing to let it matter, and I wasn’t willing. I was unwilling, and I was afraid. In spite of myself, I felt myself changing, but I was afraid to change. I didn’t want to be carried away from my old love for Virgil, which I thought my grief preserved, or from my loyalty, which I deeply owed and felt, to him and his family. I was afraid of the unknown, even of my own life that was unfinished and going on.

  Nathan began to speak to me, not in a friendly way in passing, in front of company, but as he got or made the chances he began to say things to me that were meant for me alone.

  The first thing he ever said in that way was, “Hannah, there’s going to be a dance down to Hargrave. I want you to go with me, and I think you ought to let me take you.”

  Just like that. He wasn’t handing me a “line,” for sure. It wasn’t a request. It was hardly even polite. He had made up his mind and he was telling me, take it or leave it. He wasn’t offering me a “date.” He was offering me himself, as he was.

  I had never called him by name. I said, “I don’t think so.”

  He didn’t ask me why. He didn’t look or sound regretful. Just a little on the kind side of carelessly, he said, “Well. All right.”

  He was going to have to make do with the Rosebud girls a while longer, but he had troubled me.

  He knew he had. After a time or two, he gave up asking me to go out with him, understanding, I think, the difficulty of that for me. How could I think of going out on dates from the house I had lived in with Virgil, that I still lived in with his parents, the house where Mr. and Mrs. Feltner had so freely made me at home? But after that he continued to talk to me. And I continued to listen, and even sometimes to say something in return. I still looked at him only in glances. It wasn’t going to be easy for me to look straight back at that look of his. It would not be easy and it would not be soon. But it became easy to call him Nathan and to listen to him and to answer. I liked him. I had better go ahead and say I loved him, risky as it is to use that word so soon. Your first love for somebody can last, and this one did, but it changes too after promises have been made and time has passed and knowledge has come. But even then, even before the beginning, I loved him. When I felt him looking at me with that look, I felt it like a touch.

  It was a strange courtship we had. My love for Virgil had begun in a kind of innocence, leading only in time to knowledge. But what was coming into being between Nathan and me was not a youthful romance. It was a knowing love. Both of us had suffered the war. He had fought in it, and I had waited it out in fear and sorrow at home. We both were losers by it, he of a brother, I of a husband. Now we were coming together out of fear and loss and grief, and we knew it. Each of us knew that the other knew it. That was why Nathan was so direct with me. It was why I kept holding him off. For the time being we were seeing differently, but we were seeing the same thing. We weren’t fooling around.

  When he would speak to me in our brief encounters in passing, what he was trying to tell me, what he was letting me see though he couldn’t tell me, was what he wanted and how much he wanted it. He wanted me. He made that plain enough, and without any roundabout. He was waiting only for my permission, and when I gave it I would know what to expect.

  But he wanted more than me. He wanted a life for us to live and a place for us to live it in. I can see it as I saw it then, and I can see it as I know it now. He had gone to the war and lived through it, and he had come home changed. He saw Port William as he never would have seen it if he had never left and had never fought. He came home to these ridges and hillsides and bottomlan
ds and woods and streams that he had known ever since he was born. And this place, more than all the places he had seen in his absence, was what he wanted. It was what he had learned to want in the midst of killing and dying, terror, cruelty, hate, hunger, thirst, blood, and fire.

  But this was not a simple desire. In order to have the place, he needed me. In order to have me, he needed the place. He knew these things because he was no longer a simple man. He had come to his desire by going through everything that was opposed to it. Nathan plainly wasn’t trying to make it big in the “postwar world.” He wasn’t going anywhere. He had come back home after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. Members of Port William aren’t trying to “get someplace.” They think they are someplace.

  Watching him and watching myself in my memory now, I know again what I knew before, but now I know more than that. Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world’s wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.