From the first day we had all the help we needed, and sometimes more. Whenever the Coulter brothers or the Feltners could spare a little time, some of them or all of them would be over here at our place, doing something that needed to be done. Nathan mended two stalls in the feed barn and brought over a team of mules and a mowing machine. The island of mowed land in the yard soon spread to include the garden, the barn lot, a strip along the lane down to the woods on the creek bluff, and a scrap of pasture behind the barn. Nathan and Burley mended fence for a day or so, and then when they were idle the mules were turned out to graze in the pasture. Before long, a Jersey cow was grazing with them, and her good milk and cream and butter were the first of our own produce that we put on our table. And then Nathan caught a dozen of Burley’s half-wild mongrel hens, and we began eating the eggs that Little Margaret and I gathered in our own henhouse.
When we had got ourselves moved in with our hodgepodge of furniture, the house looked bare and spare and incomplete enough. We had no rugs, no window shades or curtains, and the walls were just splotches of bare plaster and old wallpaper. I didn’t mind. I had never had a house of my own before, and I was happy. Mrs. Feltner accepted it all in a good spirit, she was even amused by it, but she wasn’t as reconciled as I was.
One day she said, “Honey, you have got to have some curtains.”
And so she appointed herself and measured the windows and made curtains.
She was right. The curtains civilized the place and gave it a touch of warmth and care that pleased us all.
It was during that time of beginning that I learned really to know Jarrat Coulter, my new father-in-law. It had been no trouble to know Burley, that wondrous, wayward, loyal, funny, grave, thoughtful, tender, solitary, companionable man. Burley had spent a lot of his life alone, fishing, hunting, rambling about in the woods. And he had lived alone after his parents were dead and the boys gone. But he loved company too, and he loved talk. You could get to know Burley in about thirty minutes. Well, maybe that is not quite right. It would be better to say that after you had known him for thirty minutes, you wouldn’t be surprised by anything more that you learned about him.
Jarrat was something altogether different. By the time I married Nathan, I had “known” Jarrat for several years, but I still knew him only by his looks and reputation. Looking at him, you knew he was a man who had not spared himself. He had the lean look, not of a young man or of a man at all maybe, but of an old timber after the sapwood has sloughed away. You knew he was either distant or cold or proud or shy, for nothing that he was thinking showed in his face, and he had far less to say than Nathan ever did. By reputation, he was work-brittle and enduring, scornful of hardship and discomfort. People said he had never finished grieving for his young wife. After she died, he had closed up, like a morning-glory in the afternoon. He had learned to live for work, not out of need or greed, and not as a burden, but as a comfort, the mere interest and pleasure of seeing each task accomplished as each year brought it around again.
He was born in 1890. The summer Nathan and I married, Jarrat was fifty-eight, beginning to get old. His hair was white, his eyebrows coarse and gray, his mouth set as if he did not intend to open it until later, and only then for a good reason. But whenever Nathan and Burley were at work at our place, Jarrat would be with them. Sometimes, knowing of something needing to be done, he would come alone. Sometimes when he knew of something that I needed to have done, he would come and do it. If there was only one way it could be done, he would just go ahead. If there was more than one way, he would ask me how I wanted it, and he would do it exactly as I asked. Gradually I realized that he was being just awfully kind to me, that he cared about me, that he understood the loss that I had come from to this place, that he wanted me to be glad I was married to his son. And I began the wish, that stayed with me for the rest of his life, to hug him for the sweetness I had learned was in him. I never did, for fear of embarrassing him. Now that I am old, I know I could have done it, it would have been all right, and I’m sorry I didn’t.
Little Margaret was in awe of him, and he maybe was a little in awe of her, having had neither a sister nor a daughter. Unless she was in some danger, he seemed never to mind having her in his way, but just smiled and worked around her. They somehow made themselves comfortable with each other without ever saying much of anything. Jarrat had no gab at all. She had plenty, but she would stand beside him and watch him work and never say a word.
Burley she adored, for he never tired of paying attention to her. He would look down at her, make his voice little, and say, “Now, ain’t she a pretty girl!” As endlessly as she talked to him, he courted, teased, and flattered her. And clowned for her. He could make her cackle.
Little Margaret settled the terms of her friendship with Jarrat and Burley right away. It took her longer to make up her mind about Nathan and our new household. As soon as she knew that I loved Nathan, she held herself away from him and in a funny way kept him under watch. And Nathan, who had not been much with children since he was a child himself, surprised me by knowing how to deal with her. He never offered himself to her until she in some way offered herself to him. He never corrected her until she had made friends with him and he knew she loved him. At first she used no name for him at all. And then she called him “Nathan,” as I did. And then, when she realized that her playmates in Port William all had daddies, she began calling him “Daddy.”
With the same patience Nathan not only honored his promise to the Feltners that I would remain their daughter and Little Margaret their granddaughter, but he made himself a son to them. He promptly fixed our part of the line fence, as he had told Mr. Feltner he would, and as soon as he could he rebuilt it. As he saw other things that they needed to have done, he did them. He became watchful over them, and gradually they learned to depend on him.
Little Margaret had the freedom of both households, and her trips back and forth were the stitches that joined us all together. She did love all the business of “camping out” with Nathan and me, but she often needed to go back to the Feltners’, which for a long time she continued to call “home,” and where her room was kept for her just as it had been. We allowed her to go pretty much as she wished, only forbidding her to change her mind after she once had made it up. She couldn’t spend the night with her granny and granddaddy and decide to come back to our house, and then decide to go back to the Feltners the same day.
There came a time when Nathan put a gate in the line fence, and a well-worn path went from our house to the Feltners’, used first by Little Margaret and then by our two boys, who called the Feltners “Granny and Grandaddy” just as Little Margaret did.
We had made it past hard changes, and all of us were changed, but we were together.
10
Our Place
And so I had put myself in Nathan’s hands, mindful also that he had put himself in mine. We were each other’s welcomer and each other’s guest. And so we had come to our place.
Until we had actually moved in, we continued to call it “the Cuthbert place,” as you would call a stranger “Mister.” But after we slept there the first night, we called it “our place.” And others began calling it “Nathan and Hannah’s.”
But for a good many years old-timers in Port William, loyal to the past, went on calling it “the Cuthbert place.” To anybody looking for us, they would say, “Oh, you’ll find them at the old Cuthbert place. Take the first left yonder just past the edge of town, then the first left again after the road has started down the hill. You can’t miss it.”
If you were bred to the plains or the seashore or the mountains, maybe you wouldn’t enjoy it here. But if the Port William neighborhood looks at all like home to you, then you may think this a pleasant place, or even moving and beautiful. It surely is a place like no other. As you start down the hill toward the river, with the woods on both sides of the road, you won’t expect it’s here. A good many strangers, having been instructed in town that the
y couldn’t miss it, have missed it.
But if you are looking, you’ll see our mailbox that still says “N. & H. Coulter.” And you’ll see that some of our local “young men” have seen fit to hit it with a big rock so that the door will no longer shut.
Past the mailbox you have left the public behind. The lane dips down, crosses the creek on a bridge that Nathan had rebuilt not long before he died, and then curves gently upward and around the slope in a way I think is lovely. The lane is just a narrow sleeve passing through the trees and the undergrowth. The trees are fairly old, and you know you’re passing through one of the orders of the world. And then almost all of a sudden your eyesight widens sweetly out onto the upland, and you see that you’ve come into an order of another kind, a farm kindly kept, you may say, for a lifetime. You see the house in its shady yard, the barns and other buildings, and the broad, long ridge rising beyond.
What you won’t see, but what I see always, is the pattern of our life here that made and kept it as you see it now, all the licks and steps and rounds of work, all the comings and goings, all the days and years. A lifetime’s knowledge shimmers on the face of the land in the mind of a person who knows. The history of a place is the mind of an old man or an old woman who knows it, walking over it, and it is never fully handed on to anybody else, but has been mostly lost, generation after generation, going back and back to the first Indians. And now the history of Nathan’s and my life here is fading away. When I am gone, it too will be mostly gone.
Sometimes I imagine another young couple, strong and full of desire, coming quietly into this old house that will be empty again of all that is of any use, and will be stale and silent and dingy with dust, and they will see it shining before them as Nathan and I saw it fifty-two years ago. And I say, “Welcome! Love each other. Love this place and use it well. Bless your hearts.”
That is the foretelling of my hope. The foretelling of my fear is that no such couple will ever come here again to live in this place and renew it and make their living from it. It could all end in fire, as everybody knows. And maybe the hand of God is in it, who can say? Maybe it won’t be a flood and a rainbow this time, but a mushroom cloud and then silence. Which will solve our problems for the time being.
But the cities are overflowing and stepping toward us too. Mr. Feltner used to say in his last years, “You see those old hillsides of mine? Some day they’ll be covered up with little huts.” Maybe so. Or maybe all our work and care will be bulldozed away to make room for something fancier, for Port William Estates or Sand Ripple Park or Sandhurst or The Meadows.
Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.
I think of Art Rowanberry, another one who went to the war and came home and never willingly left again, and I quote him to myself: “Something better! Everybody’s talking about something better. The important thing is to feel good and be proud of what you got, don’t matter if it ain’t nothing but a log pen.”
Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thoughts and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, “Thy will be done,” and then again I am free and can go to sleep.
I am yet well able to look after myself and do my work and see to the place and walk about. In the latter part of the afternoons, after my housework is caught up, and if it is firm underfoot, I take my stick and go out for a walk. Danny Branch and his boys and their boys do all the farming on this place now, as well as on the Feltner place, the Coulter home place where Danny lives, and the Jarrat Coulter place. I go partly to see what they have been doing, and to look at the cattle. Partly I go to see the place.
It is like putting your own foot into your own shoe. Familiar. A comfort. I see the place itself, as it is, and I see all that we have done here, our long passing over the fields that was our living and our life.
It is a beautiful place. I go up to the very top of the ridge, and from there I can look across the Feltner place at the rooftops and treetops of Port William. Turning the other way, I can see the opening of the river valley, and across it to the slopes and ridges on the far side. Sometimes when the evening is fine and there is a pretty sunset, I may stand and look until the last of the color has left the sky.
Our place, I am proud to say, shows everywhere the signs of careful use. “It’s good-natured land,” Wheeler Catlett used to say. “It responds to good treatment.” It responds to bad treatment too, of course, and quicker, but Wheeler was right. The problem is how to maintain good treatment beyond an occasional lifetime.
Since we have had it, the place has been laid out in three levels—or, you might say, in three steepnesses. At the top, on the best-lying or gentlest sloping land, we raised our crops and made our hay. Nathan’s rules from the start were never to plow too much in any year, never to grow more grain than we needed to feed our own livestock, and never to have too much livestock. We didn’t overgraze the pastures, and we sowed the cropground to wheat or rye in the fall. So what you see now on these fields is mostly grass and clover, more than enough in any but the driest years, and the trees left here and there for shade and of course for prettiness. And there are ponds now in the heads of the draws for stockwater and fish and for irrigation when we need it.
Where the slopes are steeper and more likely to wash, but not too steep to mow, we have permanent pastures, and we have tried to keep the cattle off those places after the ground gets soggy in the wintertime. A big cow on a soft hillside is a plow, worse than anything except a big horse. On the steepest ground we have let the woods grow. In some places the woods is fairly old. In others, just thickets when we came, the trees by now have grown tall, though of course for trees they are still young. As trees go, I would say they are getting about old enough to vote. We have fenced the stock out of the wooded places, first to help the trees, and then, as we got older, to make it easier to find the cattle.
Sometimes when I go up on the ridge, I walk over onto the Feltner place. After Mrs. Feltner died, it went to Little Margaret, who at that time became simply Margaret. She lives in Louisville and doesn’t get out here to see to things often enough, as I’m bound to say. Sometimes she will come to see me without ever going to see her place. In fact, she doesn’t need to worry, for Danny and his tribe are honest and they are good farmers. But I like to know what is going on, and I go over there to see. The old house is being rented, not to anybody for very long these days, and it is suffering. It has been a long time since I have gone near the house.
Or, if I just want to walk, and especially if I need to be consoled, I go down the lane in front of the house and through the gate and into the woods. What I like about the woods, what is consoling, is that usually nobody is working there, unless you would say that God is. The only trouble with my woods walking is that it is downhill going and uphill coming home.
My path through the woods would hardly show itself to anybody but me, but I use it often enough to keep it followable. It goes around the hillside where it folds into the crease of the steep little stream called Shade Branch. The line between us and the Feltner place follows Shade Branch. The woods is old enough to be fairly free of undergrowth. I go along slowly, watching for whatever may present itself.
Shade Branch, except for a deep hole or two, dries up in the summer. But as the light weakens and the days shorten, the winter rains start it running again. One of the happiest moments of my walks is when I get to where I can
hear the branch. The water comes down in a hurry, tossing itself this way and that as it tumbles among the broken pieces of old sea bottom. The stream seems to be talking, saying any number of things as it goes along. Sometimes, at a certain distance, it can sound like several people talking and laughing. But you listen and you realize it is talking absolutely to itself. If our place has a voice, this is it. And it is not talking to you. You can’t understand a thing it is saying. You walk up and stand beside it, loving it, and you know it doesn’t care whether you love it or not. The stream and the woods don’t care if you love them. The place doesn’t care if you love it. But for your own sake you had better love it. For the sake of all else you love, you had better love it.
Sometimes Shade Branch gets wild and strong enough to move big rocks. You see what it does, and you know that while the water is running down it is cutting back. It is wearing into the slope, making the hill low, and somewhere exalting a valley. And you know that a day of the world will come when the farm where Nathan and Hannah Coulter made their love and did their work will be gone, not into the hands of another couple or underneath a housing development, but just gone. And you must say, “Blessings on it. Thy will be done.”
As Shade Branch comes down near to where it flows into Sand Ripple, about where my path meets it, the descent becomes gentler. You’ve come to a little patch of bottomland, nearly level, but a rough, unfinished-looking piece of work, even so. The trees like it here and have made a good stand, but there is a lot of undergrowth. The soil is full of the rocks that Shade Branch has gouged out of the hill and carried down and let loose. And everywhere there are old ditches and channels where the stream has run before.
Hannah Coulter Page 9
