Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  But Marcus, as I well knew, was not a frog. Marcus, in fact, had been pretty well what the recipe called for: handsome, smart, well-mannered, from a nice family, a promising young man in every way. So how come he ended up leaving his wife and boy, talking about “fulfillment” and his “need to be free”? “It’s the time,” I thought. “The time wants men to be as silly in character as they are by nature.”

  It is easy enough for a woman to feel threatened by a man’s manly instincts, once she knows what they are. And a woman’s womanly instincts are no better. Men don’t usually leave their wives for the pleasure of solitude. A man’s desire is the most flattering mirror a woman ever stands before, and she wants to see herself shining in it. But after Marcus left Margaret rejected and alone and Virgie mostly without a daddy exactly when he most needed one, I kept fuming in my mind about men. I could hardly stop long enough to fume about Marcus’s girlfriend, soon enough his bride.

  One night I said to Nathan, “What are we going to be, just a bunch of livestock? Are the men just going to breed from one to the next like buck sheep?”

  In my anger, I thought he might offer some kind of apology for the nature of men or, even better, defend it. I was ready for a fight.

  But of course he didn’t do either one. He was reading the paper, and for maybe a minute he went on reading it. And then he laid it on his lap and folded it up, looking straight at me the way he would do. He said, “That would take a world of time and trouble, Hannah. It would have been better for Marcus if he had been tireder at night.”

  Nathan was a rock for me when I needed one, and when Virgie needed one he was a rock for Virgie. When he was little, Virgie liked to come to stay with us. After his parents divorced, he began needing to come. He was big enough by then to be of some help, and he wanted to help. It was help that Nathan was glad enough to have. He was glad of the company too, I know. He paid Virgie a fair wage, and the two of them would be together at work all day. For a long time Virgie would come to stay with us every chance he got, every holiday, most weekends, and all summer. It was a joy to me to be cooking again for a hungry boy, and I too was glad of his company.

  At the time Virgie started seriously working for Nathan he was getting to be a big boy, but he had a lot of growing still to do. He was at the age when he was neither a boy nor a man. He looked somehow out of place everywhere, even in his own clothes. He was so eager to do well and to please that sometimes he overdid it, went too fast, and screwed things up or broke something. He was a quiet boy, hardly more talkative than Nathan, but was watching us all the time to see if he was doing all right, if we approved of him. Which usually we did.

  He and Nathan made an odd team, a boy with energy to spare and an aging man with only enough. “I can barely stay with him,” Nathan would tell me in front of Virgie. “He’s about to leave me in the dust.” And Virgie, trying not to look proud, would look so proud that we could have laughed if we had let ourselves.

  He was always doing something like that, something boyish and awkward and tender and exposed, that made me want to hug him. And when I wanted to, I did. He was always very willing to be hugged. And I would see Nathan standing with his arm around him in order to tell him something or reaching out to give him a pat.

  To this day, I don’t know what Nathan expected Virgie to turn out to be. Virgie’s future was not a subject we talked about. Caleb, I think, had pretty well cured Nathan of forming expectations about the futures of other people. But of Virgie in the present, I know he expected a good deal. He expected him to stay at his work and do it right. Virgie was willing enough to do both, but when he was wrong, Nathan would correct him. I can hear him now: “Whoa, Virgie! That’s not the way. Use your head, now.” And Virgie was making a good hand. He was learning to be a farmer, and he was proud of himself.

  Nathan might as well have been Virgie’s own grandfather, just as he himself might as well have been the Feltners’ son. Virgie was receiving from Nathan about the same handed-down love that he would have received from Virgil, if Virgil had lived. And Nathan’s love for Virgie didn’t have any of the strictness that often gets into fathers’ love for their sons, that got into Nathan’s love for his own sons, out of his fear for them. Maybe Nathan really was withholding all expectations from Virgie’s future. Virgie, anyhow, felt free with him, and he loved him as maybe a boy can only love his grandfather.

  At first, when Virgie came out for a stay, Margaret would bring him, or, if Nathan or I had to be in Louisville for something, we would bring him home with us. He came, either way, with his mother’s permission. And then, after the divorce, as the hard days of his growing up came on him, he began showing up here sometimes without her permission. He would be at odds with his teachers or with Marcus or both, which would sooner or later put him at odds with his mother. And then, feeling friendless and ill-at-home in Louisville, he would put out his thumb and catch a ride, or several rides, to Port William, missing usually a day of school in the process. Nathan would have to pat him down, like bread dough that was rising too fast, and take him back home.

  And then Virgie pretty much quit coming out here at all. It was, I guess, predictable enough. First came girls, and then a town job after school and on weekends, and then a car, and then other things that I know even less about. With all their energy to spend, and especially now, the young live several lives. They live out of one life and into another as easily as they ever grew out of their clothes. That is wonderful, but it is dangerous. For a while, this place and working with Nathan were all the world to Virgie, and then his life in Louisville became his world.

  His parents tried to keep him in his old life and ways. Margaret, I think might have done it, for she was pretty sensible and steady with him. But she failed. She failed, partly at least, because her wishes for Virgie were the same as Marcus’s, and Virgie had turned hard against Marcus. They mainly wanted him to do well in school, and they were against some things—the job, going out too much at night—because they distracted him from school. And if Virgie had to defy his mother in order to defy his father, he was willing to do it. After all, he was just a boy.

  Margaret and Nathan and I had all been careful enough, I think, to shelter Virgie from our opinions of Marcus, but Virgie had got old enough to have his own opinions. On the issue of his parents’ divorce he took his mother’s side. He knew that the divorce had weakened his father’s authority over him, and that it was even further weakened by the settled fact of his own unhappiness and rebellion. It became his policy to do whatever he knew for certain that Marcus didn’t want him to do. He was too young to realize that his rebellion against his father became a rebellion against his mother too, and that his taking her side in the divorce had, in the final accounting, only added to her hardships.

  And so it came to be that when Virgie would be with his mother on her trips out here at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter, he would have his hair in some odd arrangement or color and a ring in his ear and a stud in his nose—I guess to show his father he didn’t give a damn, which of course he did or he wouldn’t have been trying so hard to act like he didn’t.

  Once, when Margaret came alone, I asked her, “Is Virgie taking drugs?”

  She said, “I don’t think so,” but, having no gift for deception, she might as well have said yes.

  And then Virgie quit coming up here at all. He disappeared, from us and from his mother too.

  19

  The Branches

  Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

  But whatever you hope, you will find out that you can’t bargain with your life on your own terms. It is always going to be proving itself worse or better than you hoped. Whatever we had hoped for Virgi
e, his absence from us was hard. It was a sorrow. We missed him. We worried about him. In the night, when somebody you need has strayed from you, you worry and you imagine trouble.

  Virgie was a long way from knowing how people are bound together. He didn’t know, for one thing, how much he was living his mother’s life. When he put himself beyond our reach, he put his mother beyond our reach too. The only help she needed, really, was help for him. Because we couldn’t help him, we couldn’t help her.

  We didn’t speak of Virgie much, but I knew it was a sorrow to Nathan to have him gone. Virgie had been a big help here by the time he quit helping, when he was sixteen or a little past, and he had been a lot of company. When Virgie disappeared from us he was about eighteen, it was 1994, and Nathan was seventy. At seventy he was still a strong man, well able to work, but he had his aches and pains and he was slowing down.

  He was entering into the loneliness that I had seen coming and hoped and prayed against, the loneliness of an old farmer on a farm that seems to be growing old too, because its young people are gone and are not coming back, and there seems less and less reason to keep it going. Nathan was still keeping our place going. He kept the fences and the buildings mended and the roofs painted, but it had been a while since he had made new improvements. The cow herd, by his good judgment, was better than it had ever been, but the sheep and the hogs were long gone, along with the milk cows. The Branches, with Nathan’s help when they needed it and he could give it, were raising the crops. We still raised a good garden and kept a few hens.

  Things were keeping on in a way, but we and our place were running down. There comes a time in the life of a farm when it needs young people coming on full of strength and hope with the future shining before them. It begins to need work faster than the old people can supply it. Nathan dealt with this by shutting his mouth and going ahead the best he could. And so, mainly, did I.

  Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good. The light that had lighted us into this world was lighting us through it. We loved each other and lived right on. We sat down to the food we had grown and ate it and praised it and were thankful for it. We suffered the thoughts of the nights and at dawn woke up and went back to work. The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise.

  You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light. Under the bare trees the wildflowers bloom so thick you can’t walk without stepping on them. The pastures turn green and the leaves come.

  You look around presently, and it is summer. It has been dry a while, maybe, and now it has rained. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up in a flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.

  And then it is fall and the cornfields are ripe and the calves are fat and shiny and the wooded valley sides are beautiful with color. The sun is bright, the air clear, and the shadows dark. There is the feeling of completion and storing up and getting ready.

  You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget.

  You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

  And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

  But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

  Your life, as you have lived it, is way back yonder in time. But you are still living, and your living life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it. And the living are in it. As Nathan and I got old and our place called out more and more for younger people, the living who meant the most to us were Danny and Lyda Branch and their children. They had always been part of our membership, we had loved them always, but there came a time when they were necessary to us. We couldn’t have got along without them. They have been a godsend.

  Danny, as you might say, came into the membership unannounced. Burley was thirty-seven years old when Danny was born. He was surprised, but was well past the time when he might have been greatly astonished that a thing so natural as his long love for Kate Helen Branch should have had a natural result. Before then he had not been a man much excited about results.

  And so when Danny made his appearance, the world continued in its daily course without being overly impressed, and so did Burley. Burley knew that certain duties had arrived with his baby son, and he felt the seed of fatherly pride and love sprouting in his heart, but he went on mainly as he had before. He regarded Danny simply as a matter of fact, and without marrying his son’s mother, or making any other noticeable change, he simply afforded as much room in his life to Danny as Danny was able to occupy.

  The others were not more aware than they had to be that Burley even had a son until Danny appeared in person. He just more or less showed up, following Burley through the woods and fields, Nathan said, like a toy dog on a string, with the smile he was going to be known for already on his face. It was a smile that was going to serve for many words. His eyes were black, as bright as buttons, forever trying to see everything, and not missing much. He would follow Burley for hours, hunting or rambling in the woods, Burley saying almost nothing, Danny nothing at all. Danny grew up with the knowledge of the old economy of the natural world that, for nothing and for pleasure, yielded in its seasons game and fish and nuts and berries and herbs and marketable pelts. “He knows more about all that than he knows he knows,” Nathan said, who knew a good deal about it himself and from the same source.

  But Danny was a more domestic man than Burley. Burley had had to learn to be domestic, had learned slowly, and had never completely learned. Danny, besides learning early a lot about domestic economy from his mother’s housekeeping during the Depression, seemed to have a gift for it. Or you might say that Danny just included the wild world in his domesticity without worrying about the difference. He gathered the woods and the waters into his homelife as a robin gathers mud and straw into her nest. Anyhow, from boyhood he was good at farming and he loved farming, like my Caleb. In his wide-eyed, quiet way he put himself to school to his uncle Jarrat, to Mr. Feltner, to Nathan, to Elton Penn, and to every other good farmer he worked with or could listen to.

  That was the education that mattered to him. He stayed in school, because he had to, until he was sixteen. The day he was sixteen, because he no longer had to go, he quit. “What I got out of school,” he used to say, “was Lyda.”

  “And for that,” Lyda would answer, “you had better thank the Lord!”

  She was right, for she exactly suited him, she was what he needed, and she knew it. She knew too, though she acknowledged it less often and more quietly, that he suited her.

  Danny quit school in 1948, the year Nathan and I married. In 1950, after his mother died, Danny married Lyda, wh
en they were still just kids, Danny eighteen and Lyda seventeen, and they moved into the old house with Burley.

  I am not sure why, maybe they were just being sensible because they were young and poor, but they didn’t have any children for seven years. And then about as fast as it could have been done, they had seven children: Will, Royal, Coulter, Fount, Reuben, Rachel, and Rosie. There were just ten years between Will and Rosie.

  Burley took immense pleasure in all this family-making, and he willingly did his share of the work and the watching over. He could be stern enough with the children when he needed to be—“for the sake of survival,” Lyda said—but, by preference, he was their playmate or their toy. I have seen them crawling on him like so many pet coons, playing with his hat or his hair, going through his pockets, unfastening his buttons, looking into his ears and nose, feeling his whiskers and his wrinkles.

  One day, in the midst of a tumult egged on by Burley, Lyda looked at me and laughed. She said, “Can pleasure have led to this?”

  And Burley said, “Well, let ’em have a little pleasure of their own.”

  His pleasure in the children owed a lot, I think, to Lyda and Danny’s good sense. The children were allowed to be as rowdy as they pleased as long as they were outdoors. And outdoors they had pretty much the run of the place, along with a regular zoo of cats and dogs, orphan calves and lambs, pet coons and squirrels and groundhogs. They followed the grownups around at work. They played with Danny’s tools and whatever was cast off and lying around: old wheels or tires or inner tubes or rope or string or pieces of chain. When they went into the house they were expected to quiet down, “for the sake of survival,” and they did. And that didn’t mean that they sat in front of the television, either. It meant that they read or played quietly or went to sleep. The older ones helped with the younger ones. They played at work until they were old enough to work, and then they worked. This is what Lyda and Danny expected of them, and this seems to have been what they expected of themselves.