Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Right at this place is the oldest, biggest sycamore in this part of the country. Hard to tell how long ago, it was struck by lightning that tore off a strip of bark down one side. As it has rotted inwardly it has grown outwardly, leaving a hollow wide enough for a man to lie down in and sleep—which, if the gossip is true, some men have done, and not always alone, either.

  One time I asked Burley Coulter, “Do you know that old tree?”

  He smiled me one of those smiles of his that could mean anything, and said, “I know it well.”

  After that, I often thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Danny Branch was begotten inside that old tree?” I reckon there’s a fair possibility that he wasn’t, but he could have been, and it would have been appropriate.

  I do know perfectly that my children made their playhouse in that tree. And sometimes yet when I pass I go inside it and stand a while, and feel enclosed and safe, like a child.

  If the water is low in Sand Ripple, you can step across it, rock to rock, just below the old sycamore. On the other side is a strip of bottomland, maybe an acre and a half, tucked in between the creek and the road, that is the most endearing spot on the farm. It is the kind of place that makes you think you’d like to live there if you had another life to live. And it did invite somebody to build a log house there, back long ago when the road from Dawe’s Landing to Port William followed the creek—I mean when the road, for a good bit of the way, was the creek. Mr. Milo Settle, who used to own the garage in Port William, was born in that house. But the only reminder of it now is a pile of rocks that were the chimney. That is where I go to rest before I begin my slow climb back home again. I sit and let the quiet come to me. It doesn’t come right away. I have to quiet myself before I can hear the quiet of the place, and a car passing along the road up on the hillside or an airplane flying over makes it harder. But I listen and wait, and at last it comes. It is an old quiet, only deepened by the sound of the creek, a bird singing, or a barking squirrel. It goes back to the beginning, and in it you can imagine the life of the vanished house.

  Over at the foot of the slope, just a little upstream from the house site, you will find the rusted fenders and other parts of a Model T Ford, which is maybe the only remaining relic of the young manhood of Burley Coulter.

  This was in the days before Burley’s old friend and neighbor Big Ellis had got married. The two of them were leading a free and adventurous life, when they weren’t at work. Their freedom and adventure, at that time, depended maybe too much on Big Ellis’s old Model T, which he kept going by working on it a lot of the time when he might have been free and adventurous. Sometimes he worked on it with wire and a pair of pliers, and sometimes he worked on it by taking some of it apart and putting it back together. He would quit working on it precisely as soon as it would run again.

  One Saturday evening Burley walked over to see if Big Ellis was ready to go. Big Ellis had the car put back together, all except for the steering wheel.

  Burley said, “Are you ready? Let’s go!”

  Big Ellis picked up the steering wheel, clapped it back into place on the end of the steering post, and said, “Let’s go!”

  He was already shaved and as dressed up as he ever got. He washed the grease off his hands and they got into the car and went.

  They went to Port William where they ran into Fraz Berlew, who sold them some moonshine, which he then helped them drink.

  When they left Port William by way of the Sand Ripple road, they were in a big hurry. I suppose they had heard of a party or a dance somewhere down by the river. The road wasn’t much in those days, and Big Ellis had the Model T leaping and bounding from one hole or hump to the next.

  Burley said, “Can’t you slow this thing down? You’re fixing to kill us, Big. I ain’t worried about you, but I’d hate to see me go.”

  So Big Ellis slowed it down.

  Burley, who never learned to drive, being perfectly satisfied to be wherever he was or wherever he could walk to or wherever he could ride to with somebody else, was a thorough critic of driving and hard to please. He said, “Can’t you speed up a little? We’ll never get there at this rate.”

  So Big Ellis speeded up again.

  They were going down the hill past our lane. Burley said, “You want to slow down for these curves, Big. I ain’t ready to die yet. I’m just a boy.”

  So Big Ellis slowed down again.

  Burley said, “Can’t you dodge about half of them rough spots? You’re wearing the hide off of me. I won’t have ass enough to hold my britchies up.”

  Big Ellis said, “Well, if you know so much about it, why don’t you drive?”

  And he lifted the steering wheel off and handed it to Burley.

  “I steered her to who laid a rail,” Burley said, “but she just kept going over the hill.”

  It went down fast, that slope being in bluegrass then, not trees, and it made, Burley said, “a perfect somersault at the bottom.”

  “After that,” Big Ellis said, “it didn’t need to be fixed.”

  They took the motor out of it to run a hammer mill, and left the rest of it where it still is.

  Here, on this place, among its stories remembered and forgotten, Nathan and I made our love for each other. Here we raised our children: Margaret, who came here with us when she was three; Mathew Burley, called Mattie, born in 1950 after I lost our first baby in a miscarriage in 1949; and Caleb, the last, born in 1952. And here is where our love for them was made. Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.

  We lived here by our work. Our life and our work were not the same thing maybe, but they were close. The children would grow up knowing how to work, and would have the satisfaction of knowing they were useful. But the foremost reason was we needed their help. From the earliest time they were able to help, we gave them little jobs to do. Sometimes when we expected and required them to do it, work was what they thought it was. Sometimes when we were all at work together, they thought they were playing, but even so work was what it was and they were helping. We were at work, and sometimes hard at work, the year round. By our work we kept and improved our place, and in return for our work the place gave us back our life. The children knew this. For a long time this was the knowledge they most belonged to.

  But sometimes too our life in this place was purely our pleasure. Those times would usually be Sundays. Sunday was the day God rested, and except for the chores we too could feel free of work. When the weather was good, and especially on the bright Sundays of spring and fall, we would go on picnics.

  Of all the times with the children, those are the ones I love best to remember, when they were still young enough to live free in their imagination. We would make big preparations: food and fishing poles and a can of worms and plans. Would we see Indians? No Indians had been seen lately on Sand Ripple, but who could tell? Wild animals? Oh, we are not likely to see them, but they will see us. Can we build a fort? Oh, yes indeed, plenty of rocks for that. And we’ll cook outdoors like the settlers? Exactly. And we’re never coming home? Never.

  After church we would have a snack to waylay hunger a while, and then we would set out on our journey, the children with whatever plunder they imagined they would need, I with the fishing poles to safeguard the hooks until time to use them, and Nathan carrying our big picnic basket and his axe.

  We would wander any of several ways down off the upland, out of the open fields of our workdays and down into the woods, ending up always somewhere in the neighborhood of the mouth of Shade Branch and the old hollow sycamore.

  “What about here?” Nathan would say, and he would set the basket down. We would turn the children loose then to run wild in the woods at whatever game or adventure had possessed their minds on the way. I would find a good sitting place with a tree to lean my back against. Nathan would amble about a little as if to get the feel of the place, and then he would take the
axe and work up a little wood for a fire. It would be a small fire if the weather was warm, a bigger one if it was cool, but we always had to have a fire.

  Nathan had come out of the old time before chainsaws. Like Jarrat and Burley and the Rowanberrys and my father, he was an axman. An axe seemed to fit his hand naturally and almost thoughtlessly. He would look around for dead wood that would split straight and make a lasting coal. When he found what he was looking for, he would make us a neat little woodpile, never wasting a lick. I loved to watch him do that, for it is pretty work when it is done well.

  He would build the fire, giving the place a focus and making us at home. We would come to rest beside it. Sometimes Nathan would drop off to sleep. But I was always too busy looking around to get sleepy. In spring, before the leaves were out, the floor of the woods would be sunlit and bright with flowers. In fall, the color would be in the trees, the leaves coming down some days even with no air stirring, brightening the ground, and it would be so quiet you could hear them falling.

  The children would get tired of their play and come back, ready to go fishing. Nathan would get up and go with them to see that they didn’t hook themselves or drown, and they would fish from hole to hole down Sand Ripple. In the quiet after they left, I would do a sort of housekeeping. The children’s make-believe of being pioneers became almost imaginable even to me. In that place of our little journey, as if newly come, I tended the fire and made things neat, unpacked the big basket, spread a tablecloth on the ground, set out the containers of food.

  When the fishing expedition came back, I made hoecake and fried up whatever they had caught: sunfish as long as your finger or as big as your hand. If they didn’t catch fish, they fell back on crawfish. But something they had caught had to be cooked. And I remember especially how much we belonged together then, how complete we seemed with our fire and our meal, what a unit we were, and the pleasure of it. We ate and talked and rested and played. And then we gathered up our things and walked home again, with just enough daylight left to do the chores.

  11

  The Membership

  Nathan and I had to get used to each other. We had to get used to being two parents to Little Margaret. We had to get our ways and habits into some sort of alignment, making some changes in ourselves that were not always easy. We had to get used to our house. We had to get used to our place. It takes years, maybe it takes longer than a lifetime, to know a place, especially if you are getting to know it as a place to live and work, and you are getting to know it by living and working in it. But we had to begin.

  Grover Gibbs was growing the tobacco here that year, and when Nathan bought the place from the Cuthbert heirs, he bought the standing crop from Grover. But we had moved in a long time too late to do much in the way of farming that year. We were too late for a garden, except for a patch of turnips that Nathan sowed in the fall. We were, in fact, camping. But we were making plans too. And we were getting ready.

  After the 1948 crop was sold, Nathan bought his first tractor, and so did Jarrat. Burley, who did not know how to drive anything mechanical and did not want to learn, did not buy one.

  Burley, at least in the work that he did by himself on his own place, stayed with the old ways, because he saw no reason to change and he was not in a hurry. His son, Danny Branch, who was seventeen that year and had quit school and gone to farming, stayed with the old ways too. This was easier for them both after Danny married Lyda in 1950 and moved in with Burley.

  Nathan and Jarrat bought tractors, as nearly everybody else did in the years following the war, because it seemed the right thing to do. A tractor made it possible for one man to cover more ground in a day than he could with a team, and help was scarcer after the war than before. A tractor didn’t get tired. With a tractor you could work at night. And so on. But after so much has been said and done, I think Danny has had the right idea. Tractors made farmers dependent on the big companies as they never had been before. And now, looking back, it seems clear that when the tractors came, the people began to go. That is too simply put. But the fact remains that all the Branches are still doing their work mainly with horse and mule teams, and all of them are still farming. And there are a lot of Branches. I, on the other hand, am the last Coulter of the name in Port William.

  In 1949, anyhow, we put in our first full year of farming on our place. We started our garden as early as the ground would work and kept it going until the last greens froze down in November. We grew our tobacco again, added a crop of corn, and sowed our first wheat on the croplands in the fall. We got a second milk cow. Through the winter, working at odd times and with whatever help he could get, mostly from Jarrat and Burley and Danny Branch, Nathan had made the old fences stocktight. And in the spring, when the grass had come, we bought our first cattle and sheep. In the fall, after the corn was gathered, we bought our first hogs. As they found time during the summer, Nathan, mowing, and Danny, grubbing ahead of him with an axe, cleared the pastures of weeds and bushes so that the grass began to thrive. Nathan said, “It’s beginning to look like somebody lives here.”

  We didn’t have money to do much renovation of anything except the land itself. We had to put the farm to work the first thing. But that year too, we got the barns and other buildings secured on their footings and patched up to the point of usability. We still faced years of work in restoring and improving our place, of doing what we could do for it, of making it capable of doing what it could do for us, but by the end of 1949 we had mostly stopped it from running down, and in some ways it was already getting better.

  When Danny and Lyda married and settled in with Burley the next year, that solidified the family work force for the next good many years to come. We were four men then, and two women. But in addition to ourselves, a whole company of other people, at different times, in different combinations, might be at work on our place, or we might be at work on theirs. They were Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, Joe and Nettie Banion, Art and Mart Rowanberry, Big Ellis and his wife, Annie May, Elton and Mary Penn, and Andy and Henry Catlett, who in 1950 were just big boys. Of course, we didn’t all work together all the time. Sometimes we worked alone. Sometimes Burley alone would team up with Big Ellis or the Rowanberrys. Or Nathan and Elton would work together, or either or both of them with the Rowanberrys. The Catlett boys more often than not would be working for Elton. Mr. Feltner and Joe Banion would go where they were needed.

  But there were times too, mainly during the tobacco harvest, when we would all be together. The men would go early to have the benefit of the cool of the morning. The women would finish their housework and then gather, sometimes bringing dishes already cooked, to lay on a big feed at dinnertime; and then, after the dishes were done, they would go out to help in the field or the barn for the rest of the day. Uncle Jack Beechum too would often be on hand to do the little he could, to praise the work of the younger men, and of course to eat with us and pass his compliments over the food.

  This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. Andy Catlett, remembering Burley, still calls it that. And I do. This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. Joe Banion grew a crop on Mr. Feltner, but also drew a daily wage. The Catlett boys too were working for wages, since they had no crop. The others of us received no pay. The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life “and never took a cent of money.”

  The membership includes the dead. Andy Catlett imagines it going back and back beyond the time when all the name
s are forgotten. The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it. Or they leave it, as my children have done.

  Now nearly all of the membership of 1950 are dead. The still living members are mainly Danny and Lyda Branch and their descendents, the Catletts, who are still here, and me, for the little use I am. There is no longer a Feltner in Port William. The Rowanberrys all are gone. Big Ellis and Annie May were childless. Elton and Mary Penn’s children, like mine, have moved away. When I am gone the name of Coulter too will be gone from Port William, most likely forever.

  And so an old woman, sitting by the fire, waiting for sleep, makes her reckoning, naming over the names of the dead and the living, which also are the names of her gratitude. What will be remembered, Andy Catlett, when we are gone? What will finally become of this lineage of people who have been members one of another? I don’t know. And yet their names and their faces, what they did and said, are not gone, are not “the past,” but still are present to me, and I give thanks.

  Joe Banion’s was the first death. Oftentimes I think of him and of his people, never very numerous in Port William, but here with us from the beginning, members of us, though now entirely gone. Their story here is a sorrow. It was always incomplete, and its ending did not complete it.

  Joe died suddenly of a heart attack in 1951. Nettie and Aunt Fanny could have stayed. They would have been welcome, and they knew it. But with Joe gone, they chose to go. They gathered up their belongings and, with Mr. Feltner’s and Nathan’s help, moved to Cincinnati to be near Nettie’s sister, who had moved up there when she married, a long time before. They thought it would be a comfort to be with kinfolks, and maybe there was some charm for them in going north of the great river that had divided slavery from freedom.