Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  Way leads on to way, as the poet says, and what is done is hard to undo. And yet love is not satisfied with such answers but remembers and endures all things and yearns across the distances. As long as the children have been away, I still wonder about them, and I worry.

  “I worry,” I said to Andy Catlett, “because I don’t know what is going to become of them. At the end, I mean.”

  He nodded. He knew what I meant. It used to be that we sort of knew, we could sort of guess, how the lives closest to us would end, what beds our dearest ones were likely to die in, and who would be with them at the last. Now, in this world of employees, of jobs and careers, there is no way even to imagine.

  Andy said, “You’re worried because they’ve left the membership,” and he smiled, knowing we both knew whose word that was. “They’ve gone over from the world of membership to the world of organization. Nathan would say the world of employment.”

  And I said, “Yes. That’s the trouble I have in mind.”

  One of the attractions of moving away into the life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but it is a life too that ends without being remembered. The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use. When they get to retirement age, Margaret and Mattie and Caleb will be cast out of place and out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be alone at the last maybe and soon forgotten.

  “But the membership,” Andy said, “keeps the memories even of horses and mules and milk cows and dogs.”

  Caleb, anyhow, was the last of the three ever to live at home. When he was gone the nest, as they say, was empty, and that was something to be sad about. But not entirely. It was lovely after so many years to be living alone with Nathan. We were living right on. We were working hard. And yet, as Nathan said, we were “playing house” too. It was the old happiness of nobody looking, only now nobody was looking almost all the time. We got so we would be very free with looks and touches and kisses and hugs. Anybody young would have laughed at us, but now nobody young was here.

  The only people here were just this aging couple, getting a little too small for their skin, their hair turning white, standing it might be in the middle of the kitchen or the garden or the barn lot, hugging each other the way the hungry eat, in a hurry for night to fall. We still had the children to think about and worry about, of course, wherever they were, and our work always ahead of us, and the place always around us with its needs and demands, and yet for a while there I would think that this, this right now, was all the world that I held in my arms. It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it. While we held each other and our old desire came upon us, eternity flew into time like a lighting dove.

  18

  Margaret

  Burley Coulter used to describe as “wayward” the descent of parcels of land through the generations. I have seen for myself that the descent is wayward. The ideal, I suppose, would be for every farm to be inherited by a child who grew up on it, and who then would live on it and farm it and care well for it in preparation for the next inheritor. But it has not always been that way, and from the end of World War II it seems to have been that way less and less.

  Mrs. Feltner lived on for nearly five years after Mr. Feltner died. She was bedfast for about a year at the last. But her mind stayed alert and lively, and from her bedroom windows she kept constant watch on the road and on the driveway going back past the house to the barn. Until she died, everybody had the feeling of being watched over, and we knew we would have to account for ourselves.

  I would go in over there and she would already have seen me coming, or she would have recognized my steps in the kitchen, and she would be waiting for me. “Honey, I saw Nathan come in a while ago with his tractor and wagon. Are they getting ready to bale the hay? Tell me what everybody’s doing.”

  Or Andy Catlett would come in. “Honey, I saw you go by early this morning. Were you going to Hargrave? Sit down a minute, and tell Granny what you’ve been doing.”

  She wasn’t supervising or being nosey. She was one of us still. If we were doing all right, she wanted to be pleased. If we were worried or troubled, she wanted to be worried or troubled with us. After she died, I kept for a long time the feeling of being watched over by her. Andy says that he has never lost his feeling of being somehow accountable to her. As long as she was alive, her house was the focus of the farm, and her bedroom was the focus of the house. After she died, things seemed to go out of focus for a while, and I felt strange to myself. I had known her, I might as well say I had been her daughter, for twenty-eight years. In my time of greatest need she had given me her love and her kindness and her welcome, and once she had given them she never took them back. For a while after she was gone, I felt off-balance, as if I needed to learn again how to stand alone.

  The Feltners’ estate was settled by Wheeler Catlett. There were two heirs: Wheeler’s wife, Bess, and my Margaret. After some careful discussion, at first between Wheeler and Bess as I imagine, and then between Wheeler and Bess and Margaret and Nathan and me, the money and bank stock went to Bess, and the farm, with some debt to Bess, went to Margaret.

  It might have worked out that way without Wheeler, but I think the arrangement had his mark on it, and I know it was to his liking. I know pretty well how he thought about it. He would not have wanted to see the land divided. He would have wanted the farm to go intact to one heir, preferably to one of the grandchildren, for that would have promised the longest holding by the family. Bess had no need or use for a farm, and both of the Catlett boys, who by then had settled here, already had farms of their own. Henry was on the Catlett home place out on the Bird’s Branch Road, and Andy was on the old Riley Harford place on Harford Run above Katy’s Branch. The next in line was Margaret, who had no more need or use for a farm than Bess, but she was younger than Bess by thirty-seven years. Wheeler was not a great hand to depend on the future, but he would do it if he had to. “If you know you don’t know anything about the future,” he would say, “and if you believe that with God all things are possible, then you have to think that something good may happen.” The future would be a gamble, and Wheeler, having no choice, took the gamble.

  He told me afterwards, “Well, she’s got her place. If she ever wants to come to it, she’ll have it. It’s more hers, anyhow, than that apartment she’s living in.” I knew he didn’t mean just that it was legally hers. He meant also that it was hers because it would have been Virgil’s. Wheeler was a man who held himself answerable to the dead. That the place was now Margaret’s was a justice owed, and now paid, to Virgil.

  I was afraid to think that Margaret might ever come home to live. But I knew that the ownership of that farm put such a possibility ahead of us for somebody, if somebody would ever want it, and so I accepted the gamble in the same spirit that Wheeler did. And it was a comfort to me to know that Margaret would own the old place that she would think of as home whether she owned it or not, the place that would have been her father’s and mine if he had lived.

  Margaret is smart, and she has sense. Marcus has sense too, or he did for a while. Margaret’s inheritance of the Feltner place along with her debt to her aunt Bess seemed to make them more thoughtful and careful than they had been. They had enough equity in the farm to finance the purchase of a house in Louisville if they had decided to do that. Instead of paying rent then, they would have been buying something of worth that would belong to them. But Margaret said, “I don’t want to put the farm in danger to buy a house. I don’t want to owe money on everything we have.” Marcus agreed, and so they stayed in their apartment until the farm was cleared of debt. And maybe, in her mind, that too was a justice to Virgil.

  Even as an a
partment-dweller in the city, Margaret was a thrifty, practical woman. Whenever she came up here, she would pitch in with me or with Nathan and me at whatever we were doing. In the summer she would come out and help in the garden, Marcus too sometimes, and we would can and preserve for both households. She was the only one of the children close enough for us to help in that way, and it was a pleasure. We would pass along surpluses of cream and butter and eggs, and send fresh sausage and tenderloin and a ham or two when we killed hogs.

  They bought a house finally in 1975, and their only child, a boy, Virgil Feltner Settlemeyer, was born a year later. Virgie, as we called him, is the only one of the grandchildren who has lived close enough to get to know. We visited back and forth pretty often. Virgie called us Grandmam and Grandpap. He loved to see us coming when we visited down there, and he always lit here excited. When he got old enough we kept him here with us sometimes for weeks at a stretch. Following me to the henhouse and garden, or going to the fields with Nathan, or wandering about by himself, he learned some of the things I wanted him to know.

  It got so we saw a good deal more of Virgie than we did of Margaret and Marcus. They had their own house and yard and garden to look after, they were busier at work, and they were giving more time to their social life. We still had a connection, but it wasn’t what it had been. It was less practical. More and more, the connection was Virgie.

  And we continued to be connected by the Feltner place. Nathan had been the Feltner’s tenant over there, and he continued as Margaret’s tenant, though of course he was a lot more than that. He was her partner and farm manager and adviser and teacher and friend—a father to her, in fact, just as he had always been. And they got along. Under an absentee owner, a farm usually runs down, but neither Margaret nor Nathan would let that happen. Margaret willingly spent what was needed to take good care of it, and Nathan willingly went to the trouble and did the work. The farm has stayed in good shape to this day. Danny Branch has been a good and faithful successor to Nathan.

  Only the old house is suffering. Margaret hasn’t slighted it. She has kept it painted and repaired, has kept the weather out of it. But the people who rent houses in Port William now are commuters who come here to live because they can’t find “a better place.” They usually don’t intend to stay long, and usually they don’t. And so the house suffers not only the wear of use, but also the wear of indifference. When love for a place is not living in it, you will know just by driving by it on the road. This is hard on Margaret, and on me too. It was hard on Nathan. There have been chances to divide the house from the farm and sell it to people who maybe would have lived in it a long time and taken care of it, but Margaret has let those slip by. I am not sure what she had in mind, or even what Nathan had in his. I know what I had in my mind. What I had in my mind, God help me, was the thought that some day Virgie might want the place for himself, and would come there and fix the house up and renew it and live in it with a wife and children, and would bring the old memories home again, and give them a proper dwelling place. I suppose the others were thinking the same thing, but maybe not. If they were, maybe we all ought to have been more careful. But at least we weren’t hoping out loud. We weren’t allowing our hopes to become expectations.

  Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be. A lot depends on keeping the prospect open. For Virgie, the prospect, at least in this direction, began to close before he was born.

  As a farm owner, Margaret was in a pretty tilty situation. She was gone from her place. She was not living in it and thinking about it every day, which meant that Virgie, however often he came to it as a visitor and a guest, was gone from it too. He grew up without any idea what it is to live in a place and think about it and do its work and worry about it and love it and admire it every day the year around.

  As a woman living in the modern world, Margaret’s situation was also pretty tilty. I had thought it was, but it turned out to be more tilty than I had thought.

  She and Marcus were working in different places, going off every morning in opposite directions. They worked apart, worked with different people, made friends with different people. What they had in common to hold them together were Virgie, their house, and the weekends. Margaret was still attached to Port William, not attached enough for the good of the Feltner place, and too much attached maybe for the good of Marcus and her marriage.

  How can you know what goes on inside of somebody else’s marriage? You know what you see from the outside. You know what you’re told.

  I know it was one of the earliest warm evenings in the spring of 1988. I had come out to sit on the front porch and look at the woods along the creek turning soft and green with young leaves. The cows with their new calves had just been turned into the front pasture, and they were grazing down by the spring. Nathan hadn’t come in for supper yet and probably wouldn’t until after dark. He was trying to finish planting corn before it rained. I could hear his tractor running up on the ridge behind the house.

  I heard a car come over the hill, slow down, and turn into our lane. When it came out of the woods, I recognized it. It was Margaret’s, and I knew that something wasn’t right. It was a Tuesday, the wrong day for her to be out here.

  She drove on up past the house to park in the back as she usually did, and I went through the house to meet her. I came out into the backyard just as she was getting out of the car. Her face told me again that something was not right, and out of my old uneasiness about her I said, “Where’s Marcus?”

  She had come to tell me. It was her duty to tell me, and she needed the comfort of telling me. Her face told me that she had it all composed into a little speech. She was not going to burden me with her feelings, just with her news.

  But she could manage only one word, “Gone,” and then I was holding my daughter all in pieces in my arms.

  Marcus had fallen in love with another woman. A younger woman, of course, one of the teachers in his school. It had happened, Marcus said, because “it wanted to happen.” Not because he wanted it to happen, of course. He had rented an apartment, and that day had moved out of the house. He had asked for a divorce. I led her into the kitchen and we sat down at the table.

  I said, “Where’s Virgie?”

  “Staying with one of his friends,” she said. “He doesn’t know yet. When he comes home from school tomorrow, I’ll have to tell him.”

  I wanted to say something bad about Marcus, and I was about to say it when I realized I mustn’t, because I realized at the same time that Margaret mustn’t. We couldn’t turn Virgie against his father. The most important person in this was going to be Virgie. We were going to have to keep him free of our judgment of Marcus.

  It had got dark. We heard the tractor coming down to the barn. We had finished crying by then, both of us, and we hurried now, laughing at ourselves, to get the look of crying off our faces before Nathan came in. He came in, tired, with the dust of the field on him, but alert and anxious, having seen Margaret’s car. She stood and went to him to get her hug. He looked at me, asking me to tell him what was wrong, not wanting her to have to do it, and I told him while he held her and patted her shoulder.

  I never was so grateful to him. I told him in about two sentences. When I was finished he nodded. He said, “Honey, let’s sit down.”

  She sat down again at the end of the table, where she had been before, and he sat beside her, just the corner of the table between them. He took her hand. He said, “Margaret, my good Margaret, we’re going to live right on.”

  I heard him say that only three or four times in all his life. He said it only when he knew that living right on was going to be hard. Her eyes were dry by then, but his had tears in them.

  He started talking to her about the future. She could come home. She could come back to her own place. She could be here with us, who loved her. Virgie
would have a place here where he would belong, and where he would always know he belonged.

  I don’t know that any of us believed in that future. Distance and difference had come between us, and we all knew it. But it was a possible future, and it was a gift. It signified to her that she could think beyond that day, that the world extended beyond any line that Marcus had drawn or could draw, that life was still generous, that she had in fact a life to live.

  None of us were surprised, I think, that Margaret did not choose the future that Nathan spoke of that night. Maybe she could not have chosen it. She was forty-three that year. Her life had a shape and a direction by then that would have been hard to change. More was involved of course than Nathan and I would ever know. But as it turned out, we did give Virgie a place to belong, when he most needed to belong somewhere, and maybe too a place where he will always know he belongs.

  It seems strange to me that Nathan, who I am very sure had killed people in the war, seemed never to nourish anger in his mind, but I, who have never killed anything that I wasn’t going to eat, except flies, have sometimes had thoughts that were perfectly murderous. I wanted to go to work on Marcus with a two-handed piss-ellum club, and I wanted him to know I was going to hit him a good while before I hit him.

  I would go about muttering in my mind things I enjoyed muttering and that I wished Marcus could have overheard. “Ordinarily you can’t turn a frog into a prince by kissing it,” I would think. “So girls oughtn’t to marry frogs.”