Hannah Coulter (2 page)

My father, I suppose, had too much trouble of his own to be much aware of mine. His marriage to Ivy was as big a mistake for him as it was for me, and I think he found it out pretty quick. He was a humorous, good-natured man, maybe because he hoped for little and expected less and took his satisfactions where he found them. He got along with Elvin and Allen by joking and cutting up with them. He called them Scissor Lips and Bigwig. Though their mother spoiled them and did everything for them, they paid no attention to her at all, but they minded my father and did the work he set for them to do. Still, it was a divided, unhappy household we had then, and I know he felt it.

“She's going to prove out to be righter than everybody in this world, and she'll be the only one in Heaven—except, I reckon, for Elvin and Allen.” That was the only comment my father ever made to me about Ivy. Mostly he dealt with her too by joking, and by staying out of the house as much as he could. Their failure was something you felt rather than saw.

The worst I saw of it was the night my father joined the church. There was a revival, and we were going every night to the white church that sat with the graveyard behind it at the edge of our little crossroads settlement of Shagbark.

It was good to sit there with everybody in the lighted church and to sing and listen to the preaching while the katydids cried in the warm night beyond the opened windows. What my father had done to be particularly repentant of, I don't know. He had done something.

The sermon was over and we were singing,

As soon as I saw that my father had stepped out into the aisle and started down to where the preacher stood, I knew it had something to do with
Ivy. They had quarreled, maybe. He was offering himself to God as an offering to Ivy. Or having proved in some way unacceptable to Ivy, he was hoping to be acceptable to God.

As the singing went on, he stood in front of us all with tears shining on his face. After the final prayer, when the people went to speak to him and shake his hand, Ivy ought to have gone too. Grandmam went and I went, but Ivy didn't go.

 

The trouble was that by dividing herself from him, Ivy somehow divided him from Grandmam and me. And what must have been clear enough to the two of them was forever a mystery to us. I think the house became a strange place to everybody. It surely did become strange to me, and my father too became strange to me. From the time he brought Ivy and her boys home with him, I owed everything, simply everything, to Grandmam.

In the old arrangement, my parents had slept in the living room, where the big heating stove stood in the winter. My father slept there still after my mother died, and that was where he and Ivy would sleep. My room was the one above, warmed by hot air rising up from the stove through a register in the floor. Grandmam slept on a cot in the big kitchen at the back of the ell, where she had the warmth, when she needed it, of the cooking stove, and where she kept her rocking chair and her big bureau with its drawers holding her few good clothes and her old clothes and the things she saved because they might be needed.

She had moved herself into the kitchen when my father married my mother. She wanted, as she said, to be out of the way. She wanted my mother to have a free hand with the rest of the house. And in fact she did keep out of the way, and she did give my mother, and then Ivy, a free hand with the rest of the house. Still, by making her last stand in the kitchen, she kept herself in the center of things. In the kitchen she was in charge. Other people who worked in that kitchen worked for
her.
By moving her whole life there, she had, so to speak, faced away from the rest of the house, but from the kitchen she still oversaw the garden, the cellar, the smokehouse, the henhouse, the barn lots and the barns, and all the comings and goings between barns and fields.

She was a good cook, but she also did the main work that kept us eating. She made the garden, and all we didn't eat fresh she preserved and
stored for the winter. She took care of the hens and the turkeys. She milked two cows. My father was in charge of the meat hogs, but Grandmam was the authority and head worker at the butchering and sausage making and lard rendering and the curing of the meat. In the summers she, and I with her, roamed the fencerows and woods edges and hollows to pick wild berries for pies and jam. She was always busy. She never backed off from anything because it was hard. She washed and ironed, made soap, sewed and patched and darned. Every Saturday she carried a basket of eggs and a bucket of cream to the store at Shagbark. Though she never made an issue of being the landlady, or needed to, her word on everything having to do with the farm was final. My father understood that, and Ivy didn't change it.

Grandmam was still proud of the narrowness of her waist when she was a young woman. When she married, she said, her waist had been so small that my grandfather could almost encircle it with his two hands. Now, after all her years of bearing and mothering and hard work, she had grown thick and slow, and she remembered her lost suppleness and beauty with affection but without grief. She didn't grieve over herself. Looking me up and down as I began to grow toward womanhood, she would say, “Do you know your old grandmam was like you once?” And she would smile, knowing I didn't know it even though she had told me.

She would do a man's work when she needed to, but she lived and died without ever putting on a pair of pants. She wore dresses. Being a widow, she wore them black. Being a woman of her time, she wore them long. The girls of her day, I think, must have been like well-wrapped gifts, to be opened by their husbands on their wedding night, a complete surprise. “Well! What's this?”

Though times were hard and she was poor, Grandmam was a respectable woman, and she knew she was. When there was a reason for it, she could make herself
look
respectable. But mostly, when she was at home and at work, she wore clothes that many a woman, even then, would have thrown away. Her “everyday” black dresses were faded by the sun and lye soap, and they would be patched and tattery and worn out of shape. For cold weather she had an overcoat that must have been as old as she was, but it was, she said, “still as good as new.” In any weather she was apt to be wearing a leftover pair of my grandfather's shoes that were
too big. She never gave up on her clothes until they were entirely worn out, and then she ripped them up, saving the buttons, and wore them out as rags.

She was an old-fashioned housewife: determined and skillful and saving and sparing. She worked hard, provided much, bought little, and saved everything that might be of use, buttons and buckles and rags and string and paper sacks from the store. She mended leaky pans, patched clothes, and darned socks. She used the end of a turkey's wing as a broom to sweep around the stove.

She always had one Sunday dress carefully preserved that she wore to church and on her visits to town. For those occasions she had also, during all the years I knew her, a little black hat with a brim and a bouquet of paper violets, which she wore as level on her head as a saucer full of coffee.

My father was not a man of much ambition or, to be honest, much sense about anything beyond his day-to-day life of making do and doing without. It was because of Grandmam's intelligence and knowledge and thrift that we always had a plenty to eat and enough, though sometimes just barely enough, of everything else.

And Grandmam, as I have seen in looking back, was the decider of my fate. She shaped my life, without of course knowing what my life would be. She taught me many things that I was going to need to know, without either of us knowing I would need to know them. She made the connections that made my life, as you will see. If it hadn't been for her, what would my life have been? I don't know. I know it surely would have been different. And it is only by looking back, as an old woman myself, like her a widow and a grandmother, that I can see how much she loved me and can pay her out of my heart the love I owe her.

 

The day my father went away to marry Ivy, Grandmam lost no time in getting me and all my things moved into the room over the kitchen—furniture, clothes, everything. That room was divided from the upstairs rooms at the front of the house by a hallway and another room that was full of broken furniture and such. When our work was done, Grandmam locked the hall doors and put the keys in her pocket.

She said, “Things are going to be different here, and you don't want to
be in the middle of them.” I didn't yet know what she meant, but of course she knew Ivy and her boys, and she foresaw what was coming.

By the time my father and his new family got home that night, the change was all accomplished and beyond talking about. As far as Ivy would ever know, I had always slept in the room over the kitchen and those doors had always been locked. Anyhow, we left her free to suppose it.

And so I began, you might say, a new life, and from then until I left home the center of it would be Grandmam.

She took my side. My own mother was gone. Ivy was not going to be a mother to me—as I think Grandmam foreknew, and as Ivy proved. And so Grandmam came back from that distance in time that separates grandmothers from their grandchildren and made herself a mother to me. She disliked Ivy's open partiality to her boys, and so Grandmam made a principled effort to disguise her own partiality to me. And she did usually disguise it pretty well, partly because I felt the need for disguise myself and did all I could to cooperate.

But sometimes Grandmam favored me in ways that she thought were clever and secret but were obvious to everybody and embarrassing to me. For instance, to save sugar we drank our coffee bitter, though with plenty of cream. In fact, I liked it that way. But every so often Grandmam would become unable to bear it—for me, that is, she would just not be able to stand it any longer. I would be sitting with the others at the table, Grandmam standing at the stove, as she preferred to do, to wait on us and then eat her own meal in the quiet later. All of a sudden I would see her hand dart over my shoulder and dump a spoonful of sugar into my coffee. She perfectly believed that she was being too quick and sly to be noticed. But of course everybody saw. I was a grown woman with children before I realized how funny that was, and how recklessly devoted. She was like an old ewe with one lamb.

But her love for me had also more practical outcomes. She said, “You have got to have some money, child.”

She was looking ahead. I had not the least idea what she saw, but I understood pretty quick that she was looking ahead. She was thinking of a time when I would not be a girl anymore but would have needs that I would have to meet. Sometimes it seemed dreadful to me that I was
coming to a time that would make such demands. But Grandmam was a demanding woman in the present, and she didn't leave me much time to worry about the future.

She had not had much schooling—only eight grades—and so school was a big thing to her. “You have got to learn your books,” she said. “You have got to keep at your studies.”

And so at night, after the others had cleared out of the kitchen and we had put away the dishes, we would sit down across the table from each other, the best oil lamp between us, she with her work basket and mending and I with my books. We would sometimes look up from our work and talk a little, taking a rest, but neither of us went to bed until my homework was done.

To the extent that she could see to it, I did learn my books. In fact, I became the valedictorian of my graduating class of ten students at the Shagbark School. And again Grandmam embarrassed me by declaring to Ivy and her boys, who were resentful, and to others, who were not the least bit interested, “She is a valedictorian.”

As she knew, my need for money was just as serious as my need for book learning. To take care of that, she put me to work, and in that way she gave me knowledge just as worthy as any that I got from books, and of more use. The day we moved me into the room over the kitchen was also the day she told me, “You have got to have some money.”

“Listen,” she said. “You have got to learn to be some account. From now on, when you're at home and you're not at your studies, I want you to help me.”

That was when I was twelve. From then until I was eighteen and graduated from school, I would be at work with her—in the kitchen, in the garden, in the henhouse, in the cowstall. Six years. She was a hard teacher when she needed to be. She made me do my work in the right way. And I learned all the things she knew, which turned out to be all the things I would need to know after I married Nathan in 1948. Though she could not have known it, and she never knew it, the things she taught me were good seeds that sprouted and grew.

She paid me for my work with the surplus eggs and cream that we carried into Shagbark and sold at the store every Saturday. Out of my earnings I bought my clothes and the few things besides that I needed.
That, as Grandmam foresaw, gave me a certain independence from Ivy, who then couldn't blame me for spending my father's money. What I didn't spend, I saved. In the six years I saved $162.37.

Grandmam was an early riser. She got up way before daylight, even in the summer, partly because she had slept her limit, but she took pride in it too, and she gave the habit to me. I would hear her cot creak as she sat up and began to grope her feet into the carpet slippers that she always wore in the house. She would feel her way to the table, strike a match, and light the lamp. She would lay wood in the cooking stove and open the draft. And then, standing close to the heat if it was winter, she would put on her clothes. She would cross the kitchen to the wash table, dip cold water from the bucket, and wash her face. And then she would sit in her rocker to brush her hair and put it up in a bun for the day. As I dressed and made my bed and brushed my own hair, I would listen to her, knowing by the sounds every move she made. By the time I came down the back stairs and crossed the porch to the kitchen, the coffeepot would have begun to whisper on the stove and Grandmam would be cutting out the breakfast biscuits.