Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

  And their beloved, lovely island was scoured and burned. Everything standing was destroyed: houses, trees, gardens, tombs, towns, the capital city of Naha, the beautiful castle of Shuri. I found books with photographs of beautiful buildings, walls and gates, bridges and gardens, all “destroyed in 1945.” I found a photograph of some tanks driving across little fields, leaving deep tracks.

  I began to imagine something I know I cannot actually imagine: a human storm of explosions and quakes and fire, a man-made natural disaster gathering itself up over a long time out of ignorance and hatred, greed and pride, selfishness and a silly love of power. I imagined it gathering up into armies of “ignorant boys, killing each other” and passing like a wind-driven fire over the quiet land and kind people. I knew then what Nathan knew all his life: It can happen anywhere.

  Like any storm, it finally ended. Like any fire, it burnt itself out. Like all the living, those doomed to die finally were dead. I imagined the quiet coming again over the burnt and blasted land. I imagined a green slope somewhere undestroyed where a fresh, untainted breeze blew in from the sea. I imagined Nathan coming there alone and sitting down, facing home, knowing that he had lived and would live, the quiet coming over him, rest coming to him. And I imagined Port William, the town, the farmsteads, the fields and the woods, the river valley and the long, slow river, taking shape again in his mind.

  And so I came to know, as I had not known before, what this place of ours had been and meant to him. I knew, as I had not known before, what I had meant to him. Our life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he had seen it always within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it.

  He was a rock to me, but now I knew that he had been shaken. Okinawa shook him, and he was shaken for life, and deep in the night he needed to touch me. I didn’t know the reason then, but now I know that some old nightmare of the war had come back to him and frightened him awake. And ever so quietly, ever so gently, so as not to wake me, he would touch me. I would pretend to sleep on, so as not to disturb him with the thought that he had wakened me. It was not a lover’s touch. As I knew partly then but know completely now, he needed to know that he was here and I was here with him, that he had come from the world of war, again, to this. Reassured, he would sleep again, and I too would sleep.

  Now I remember, now I seem to dream again, that sleep of ours, helpless and dark, precious and brief, somehow allowed within the encircling fire.

  22

  Next?

  After Nathan died, my Margaret or Lyda Branch, wanting I suppose to divert my mind, would offer me “a change of scenery.”

  “Would you like to go for a drive?”

  “No,” I would say, “I don’t think so.”

  I have my regular ways of going where I need to go, and I stick to them. There are a lot of places I don’t go back to now.

  There was a time when Nathan and I would enjoy going for a little drive just in the neighborhood, maybe late in the evening of a hot day, to cool off and see how everybody’s crops were doing. Every farm then was farmed by people we knew. But now too many of the old families have died out or gone. Farms have been divided or gathered into bigger farms; or they have been bought by people in the cities who need a place to “get away,” and who visit them for a while and then lose interest and sell them again. Such things I would just as soon not see.

  A decent half a year, about, after Nathan died, Kelly Crowley paid me a visit. I heard a car stop, went to the back door to see who it was, and it was Kelly. Here he came across the backyard, a big man, nodding and smiling and waving, his big diamond ring flashing on his big hand, his big car shining behind him.

  “Kelly Crowley!” I said. “How long has it been since I saw you? Come in here and tell me how you are.”

  I already had a good idea why he had come, I am sorry to say, but I was glad to see him, even so. Kelly was raised in Port William. He is the same age as my Caleb, they were schoolmates. I held him in my lap when he was little. He came here to play many a time. I have fed him many a meal. He was a rather chubby boy, almost dainty in the way he walked and used his hands. He suffered a good deal of mistreatment from the other boys, which he didn’t deserve then but by now has probably managed to deserve. They called him, of course, “Killer Crawley.” After high school, he moved to Hargrave, learned the real estate business, and has done, as they say, well. He has an expensive house, an expensive car, a wife and three children, each of whom has an expensive car, and none of whom would recognize as Kelly the boy I used to know, who had nothing except a bad start as the stepson of a poor tenant farmer and maybe the sweetest smile in the world, which maybe more or less in spite of himself he still means.

  The interstate highway that transformed everything within its reach also transformed Kelly Crowley. Along the widened road from the interstate to Hargrave there is the same ugly splatter of motels, filling stations, fastfood places, liquor stores, and shopping centers that you will find everywhere else, and that is Kelly’s theater of operations. That, and commuter housing developments with views, transformed Kelly from a livestock trader, auctioneer, and real estate dealer into a “developer” and a wealthy man with his thumb in the political pie. It is also the source of the extreme anxiety that those who know him well can see behind his smile. Kelly is dogged by the suspicion that other people know things he does not know, that profitable deals are being made without his knowledge, that desirable properties are being made available at a low price to somebody else. He has spent his life learning what other people have, how they got it, what they paid for it, what it is now worth, and how to get it. By something in his manner he seems always to be referring to the self-denial and the sacrifice that he has had to suffer in making himself rich. He is a martyr to his own wealth and importance.

  And yet his smile is as sweet as it was when he was a boy. His manners are as winning as ever. In his absence you tell yourself you would just as soon not see him again, and then he shows up and you are glad to see him.

  “Come in,” I said. I held the door open for him. “Sit down there at the table. Let me fix you a cup of coffee.”

  He came in. He gave me a little bow, smiling. He said, “Yes, mam, Mrs. Coulter, I will allow you to do that, if you please.”

  He sat down. “Mrs. Coulter, I was surely sorry to hear about Mr. Coulter’s passing. I wasn’t at home at the time or you surely would have seen me. I was away on a little trip, the wife and I.”

  What do you say? I said, “Thank you, Kelly.”

  “And how are the children? Caleb, I imagine, doing fine?”

  “They’re all doing fine,” I said.

  “Well!” Kelly said. That is his word when an exclamation of friendship and concern seems to be called for. It could mean approval or disapproval, or almost anything else. Sometimes it means he is not listening.

  “Caleb is still doing his research and writing his articles. He and Alice are fine.”

  “Well!”

  “Margaret is still teaching school.”

  “Well!”

  “And Mattie is in China or someplace, I reckon. He’s always someplace else.”

  “Well!”

  When it was ready, I brought cups of coffee for us both, gave him his, and sat down with mine.

  He gave me a bow and a smile, and thanked me. “Well, I’m glad to hear they’re all doing well. Mighty glad.” He put in cream and sugar. He stirred rapidly and delicately.

  “And how are you, Mrs. Coulter?” he said, smiling and bowing. “In good health, I imagine, as always?”

  He was looking straight at me through his smile, making his own diagnosis, and I was moved to look straight back. “Just fine,” I said.

  “Well, I just imagine you maybe might be moving down to Louisville to live with Margaret one of these days?”

  I was ready for that, but I let the remark hang in the air for a while to get the full benefit of it. It managed to be all at the same time a question, a recommendation, and an
expression of sympathy for an old widow living alone. He finished stirring, laid the spoon down, picked up his cup with his little finger extended, and bestowed a tiny kiss upon the rim.

  I said, “No.” And that hung in the air a while, sounding short. Just in time, I remembered Mrs. Feltner, who would have been nice to the Devil himself, on the chance that he might improve if treated well. “No, Kelly,” I said. “I haven’t thought of that. I’ve made no plans of that kind.”

  “Well! Surely, Mrs. Coulter, you aren’t thinking of living on here by yourself?”

  “I am thinking of living right on, right here.”

  “By yourself? I just made sure you’d be going to live with Margaret or some of ’em.”

  “I’m still capable of looking after myself,” I said. “And of course I am looked after.”

  “Well! Oh, I imagine! I imagine Danny Branch and them will be farming your place for you?”

  “Yes, I’ll always be able to depend on Danny.”

  “Oh, they don’t make ’em no finer than Danny Branch. No, mam!” He was drinking his coffee in something of a hurry, but precisely, in little sips. “You have a nice place here, Mrs. Coulter.” He said this looking swiftly around at the kitchen, into the living room, out the back window at the barn and the ridge rising behind it, inventorying and appraising everything. After such a look, I believe he could have gone back to his office and made a long list. “A lovely place.”

  I said, “A lot of work and love has gone into the keeping of it.”

  He spoke then under the obligation and burden of old friendship, a man of his authority being unable to stand by at such a time and not speak: “Have you given any thought to the final disposition of it?”

  By then, behind his smile and his big, dainty hands, I could see his anxiety, his almost panic. He was assuming, as I knew from the start, that as an old widow woman I would not know what I had or the worth of it, that I might not live long, that if I died and the children inherited the place, they would know the worth of it. They, being less provincial and backward than I am, would be harder to deal with than I would be.

  “Yes,” I said. And then I said something that I had not thought of before, but have hardly ceased to think of since: “I am giving some thought to putting it into a land trust, to keep it from ever being developed.”

  “Well!” he said.

  “And I have given some thought to donating it as a wildlife preserve.”

  “Well!”

  “And I have thought of having myself buried right in the narrowest part of the lane, with a stout rock wall around my grave.”

  “Well!” he said, as if this was just the sort of thing that nice old ladies like me usually did.

  He had finished his coffee. I stood up, and then he did. He took out his wallet and laid his business card on the table as he might have laid down a tip. “Well, Mrs. Coulter,” he said, as if the previous things had never been uttered, “if you ever decide to sell, I surely would be obliged if you’d give me a chance to talk with you.”

  “Of course, Kelly! I’ll always be glad of a chance to talk with you.”

  And then, the Devil getting his work accomplished in spite of me, I heard myself say, “Kelly, I see you’re putting on a lot of weight. I want you to take care of yourself. I’m busy here every day, and I would hate to have to quit and go to a funeral.”

  He couldn’t think what to say. The idea of an old widow with desirable property sitting alive at his funeral turned his world of real estate upside down like a salt shaker, and shook it. He gave me a quick unsmiling look, said “Yes, mam,” and smiled.

  We parted at the kitchen door with expressions of mutual affection, perhaps real enough.

  But my world had got shaken too. The sound of his engine had hardly died away before I realized that I could no longer imagine our place, I couldn’t see it in my mind’s eye. What did he see in it? A “country place” for some rich professional person in Louisville or Cincinnati, with our old once-renewed buildings shoved into a heap and burnt and everything brand-new? A hunting preserve for some sportsman’s club? A housing development called “The Woodlands”? Whatever vision he had of the place as it might be had driven the place as it is out of my mind. I felt bereft, and a little crazy. I felt a fierce homesickness. I put on my scarf and coat and went out.

  Of course, there it all was, familiar of old, just as I knew it, the shape of it clear and clean in the late fall with the trees bare, the wind brisk and cool, the cattle lying down in the sun up on the ridge. I walked up among them to where I could see across the Feltner place to the roofs and gables and the church steeple of Port William, with the fields and fencerows and woodlands lying about it. It had been my homeland in this world nearly sixty years, the homeland that Virgil had died from in his absence and never seen again, that Nathan had remembered and cherished in his mind and come back to.

  It was as familiar as my old headscarf and coat and shoes, as my body. I have lived from it all these years. When I am buried in it at last my flesh will be the same as it, and hardly a difference made. But I have seen it change. It has changed, it is changing, and it is threatened.

  The old neighborliness has about gone from it now. The old harvest crews and their talk and laughter at kitchen tables loaded with food have been replaced by machines, and by migrant laborers who eat at the store. The old thrift that once kept us alive has been replaced by extravagance and waste. People are living as if they think they are in a movie. They are all looking in one direction, toward “a better place,” and what they see is no thicker than a screen. The houses in Port William and even on some of the farms are more and more being used as temporary lodgings by people who temporarily, as they think, can do no better. Port William is becoming a sort of whatnot shelf where, until they can find “a better place,” people live and move and have their being.

  The old Port William that I came to in 1941 I think of now as a sort of picture puzzle. It was not an altogether satisfactory picture. It always required some forgiveness, for things that of course could be forgiven. But the picture was more or less complete and more or less put together, and the pieces were more or less replaceable. After the war ended in 1945, slowly at first but ever faster, the lost pieces were not replaced. Sometimes, as when we buried the old Feltners or Mr. Milo Settle, the new grave contained a necessary and forever finished part of the old life. The new life seems to be composed of pieces of several different puzzles never to be completed. And who is to blame for this? I don’t know. Whoever caused it, it is everybody’s disease, and nobody could have caused it who didn’t have it.

  Like a lot of old people I have known, I am now living in two places: the place as it was and the place as it is. As it was it is almost always present to me, with the dead moving about in it as they were: Virgil, Old Jack Beechum, Mat and Margaret Feltner, Joe and Nettie Banion, Burley and Jarrat Coulter, Art and Mart Rowanberry, Elton and Mary Penn, Bess and Wheeler Catlett, Nathan. By the ones who have moved away, as many have done, as my children have done, the dead may be easily forgotten. But to those who remain, the place is always forever a reminder. And so the absent come into presence.

  I knew as I walked about that day after Kelly’s visit that I will do whatever I can to see that this place is not desecrated after I am dead. But I am not going to have myself buried in the lane. I will be buried up on the hill at Port William beside Nathan, to wait for the Resurrection with him and the others.

  I walked down off the ridge into the woods farthest from the road. I found the path where the slope is not too steep. The sun was bright, and under the brow of the hill I was out of the wind. I was idling along with my stick, recognizing the trees and wishing them well.

  And then I saw this hunter slipping along through the undergrowth slowly and quietly, coming more or less toward me. He was wearing camouflage clothes, but I saw him a good while before he saw me. I let him get close, and then I said, “Good afternoon, young man.”

  He took a s
tep backward and said “Oh!” And then he pretended not to be surprised. He said, “Hello! Are you Mrs. Coulter?”

  I said, “No.”

  “Well,” he said, “we have Mrs. Coulter’s permission to hunt here.”

  “We who?”

  “Me and my buddy.”

  “I suppose you do,” I said. “She’s a generous old woman.”

  23

  Virge

  Now we are in the new year of 2001, also a new century, also a new millennium, and it is the same world still. Here in Port William, it seems, we are waiting. For what? For the last of the old rememberers and the old memories to disappear forever? For the coming of knowledge that will make us a community again? For the catastrophe that will force us to become a community again? For the catastrophe that will end everything? For the Second Coming? The only thing at all remarkable that has happened is that Virgie has come back.

  It was a quiet evening about the first of February. I had started fixing myself a bite of supper. When I heard a rather noisy old car come in and stop behind the house, I thought it must be some of the Branches. They operate a fleet of junkers, and I can’t tell which is which by the sounds they make. But I didn’t hear a car door shut and nobody came to the kitchen door, so I went out to see.

  It was getting on toward dark, but I could see the car well enough, and I didn’t recognize it. I hesitated a minute. The country is full of strangers now, and you hear tales. There are, no doubt about it, some people who would knock an old woman in the head more or less on speculation. But I thought “What of it?” and went on out.

  The driver of the car had just stopped and leaned forward onto the steering wheel. I could see a head of beautiful long hair and I thought at first it was a woman, but when I got closer I saw it was a man. I rapped on the window and he raised his head.