Hannah Coulter (23 page)

I tell it with patience, going over it again and again in order to get it right. Often as my mind moves back and forth over it, I imagine that I am telling it to Andy. That is not hard, for Andy has been listening to me all his life. Andy was in love with me a long time ago, when he was a little boy and I was his uncle's bride. That ended of course. He is not “in love” with me now. He is an aging man with grandchildren. But I know he loves me. He loves us all, the whole membership, living and dead. He has listened to us all, and has stayed with us, farming in his one-handed fashion over there on Harford Run. We are in each other's minds. I perfect these thanks by telling them to him.

As I have told it over, the past visible again in the present, the dead living still in their absence, this dream of time seems to come to rest in eternity. My mind, I think, has started to become, it is close to being, the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal, and all the creatures prosperous. The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven's. Or it is Heaven, and we are in it only
by willingness. By whose love, Andy Catlett, do we love this world and ourselves and one another? Do you think we invented it ourselves? I ask with confidence, for I know you know we didn't.

 

Nathan was sick, and he knew it, he knew it better than I thought he did, a long time before he consented to go to the doctor. He was wearing out, he said, but he wasn't only wearing out, he was sick. He lost weight and strength. He got bony and hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. You could see his skull behind his face. He felt bad. He was often almost too ill to get out of bed. But he kept on in his old way, quiet, more pleasant even than usual, staying busy off someplace, mostly by himself.

Margaret and Lyda and I were after him all the time. “Go to the doctor. You have got to go to the doctor.”

And Nathan would say, “I'm wearing out. It had to happen, you know.” He was not a doctor-going man.

Danny was the only one who did not insist. He just smiled his smile. It wasn't Burley's smile, for there was no sass in it. It was just the smile by which he kept what he knew to himself. I don't think anybody has ever asked Danny, “What are you smiling about?”

Finally we just
made
Nathan go to the doctor. Margaret and I took him to Hargrave. Our doctor there sent him to a specialist in Louisville. The specialist sent him for tests. And so on. Nathan submitted to it all with patience and quietness, even with good humor, knowing, I think, the diagnosis already.

The diagnosis was cancer, dangerously advanced and spreading, inoperable. The doctor spoke to Margaret and me, to avoid looking at Nathan. He went into the technical details, speaking of metastasis and naming organs.

But Nathan was looking at him with a straight, open-eyed look, and the doctor finally felt it. He made himself look back at Nathan, and it was to his credit.

Nathan said, “Say what you mean. It's all right.”

“Mr. Coulter,” the doctor said, “you are gravely ill, or you soon will be. The prognosis is not good, but without prompt treatment you certainly will not live long.”

Without changing his look or his expression, Nathan nodded.

The doctor went on to prescribe an intensive course of therapy, starting with radiation. It was a story we all knew, one that has been lived and told too many times in Port William, a bad story.

But I was surprised when Nathan, without exactly interrupting, stood up. He had come to the end of his submission, though not of his patience or his quietness. He put out his hand, which the doctor a little wonderingly shook. Nathan said, “Thank you, doctor. Thank you for all you've done.”

He went out, and Margaret and I, having no choice, followed.

 

I knew then what he had been doing. For a good while after he got sick, he thought he would just work it off the way he always had, he would get well. And then the truth came to him, and he faced it. After that, he was loitering, putting us off, giving himself a chance to be captured by his death before he could be captured by the doctors and the hospitals and the treatments and the tests and the rest of it. When he consented to go to the doctor he was only consenting for the rest of us to be told what he already knew. He was dying.

We parted with Margaret, who had met us at the doctor's office. We went home. Nathan hung up his suit, which he would not wear again alive, and got back into his work clothes. He walked up to the barn, and I heard him start the tractor. He put out hay for the cows. It was February, they would be calving soon, and I knew he would look at every one of them. He did his other chores. He filled the woodbox on the back porch. He built up the fires for the evening. And then he sat down in his chair by the stove in the kitchen and picked up the newspaper.

I was working at the counter by the sink, not daring to turn around. I was brokenhearted, furious, scared, and confused, crying, and determined not to let him see that I was. I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. Why I had started making a cake, I don't know. It was what my hands had found to do, and I was doing it.

And was Nathan sitting over there actually reading the paper? Well, I knew he was holding it up and looking at it. For all I know, he may have been reading it. But I knew too that he was thinking of me. My steadfast comfort for fifty years and more had been to know that I was on his mind. Whatever was happening between us, I knew I was on his mind, and that
was where I wanted to be. He was thinking of me, I was sure of that, but he had got ahead of me too. He had dealt with what the doctor had told us even before he had gone to the doctor. And now, in a way too late, I was having to deal with it. Looking back, I can see there was something ridiculous about it. There we were at a great crisis in our lives, and it had to be, it could only be, dealt with as an ordinary thing. Nathan had seen that. For my sake as much as his own, he was insisting on it. But I was too upset to see it then.

My tears were falling into the bowl of beaten eggs and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, “Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?”

I couldn't turn around. I heard him fold the paper. After a minute he said, “Dear Hannah, I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.”

He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate.

 

He lived right on.

The next morning after breakfast, with the sunlight pouring in through the kitchen windows, we sat on at the table a long time, talking of a number of things, practical things. We set our life before us as it was, and set ourselves before our life as we were, talking of what needed to be done, as we had talked many times.

And then Nathan changed the tune. Looking straight at me, much as he had looked at the doctor the day before, and taking up that subject again, he said, “I have had a good life, especially the part you know. I have liked it and am thankful for it. I don't want to end up as a carcass for a bunch of carrion crows, each one taking his piece, and nobody in charge. I don't want to be worn all to holes like an old shirt no good for rags.”

I understood him. He wanted to die at home. He didn't want to be going someplace all the time for the sake of a hopeless hope. He wanted to die as himself out of his own life. He didn't want his death to be the end of a technological process. I nodded.

He said, “I'm asking this of you, Hannah. I know it's a lot to ask. I'm sorry.”

I said, “It's not what you're asking of me that I'm sorry for. And you don't have to be sorry. Do you remember what we promised?”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

 

As the opportunities came, I talked with Margaret and Lyda. We tried to foresee needs and make plans. We went back, the three of us, to our doctor down at Hargrave.

“He doesn't want to die of a cure,” I said.

The doctor didn't want to comment on that. He nodded.

I said, “I expect there will be pain.” There was already pain, as I knew, but Nathan had not said so, and so I did not.

“There will be pain,” the doctor said.

“Will you help us to deal with that?” Margaret asked him.

The doctor nodded. “I will help you deal with that.”

“We're talking about medicine,” Lyda said. “Dope.”

The doctor smiled and nodded again. “Yes. I will help with that.” And he wrote out a prescription and handed it to me.

“So you'll have it when he needs it.”

 

Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came. Margaret came out more often than before, but she made her visits casual and not too long. Caleb came when he could. And Danny, I noticed, began showing up every day, maybe not stopping by the house, maybe not seeing Nathan, but keeping an eye on us, watching for what needed to be done and trying to get it done before it could worry Nathan. The spring work was beginning, and so Danny always had reasons to come or to send one of the boys.

Nathan knew we had pain medicine, and the time came when he needed to ask for it, but usually he would take it only at night. He didn't like what it did to his mind. It made him feel wrong. He went on as he was able, going about the place and his work, giving it up only as he had to. As he gave it up, Danny quietly took it on.

One day, sort of laughing, he said, “Hannah, I'd go to the barn and see to things, but I'm afraid if I got there I couldn't get back.”

It was April by then, a sunny morning and warm out. I said, “Well,
why don't you go out on the porch and sit a while in the sun?” He went out, and I called Danny to come and see to things at the barn.

The time soon came when he could not get out of bed. Lyda or Danny began staying at night during the week, Margaret on the weekends. And still Nathan would take the pain medicine only at night. He lay there in the daytime lucidly suffering.

 

Way in the night I heard him stir and cry out, not loudly. I got up to see about him.

I said, “Do you need anything?”

“No,” he said.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

But I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder.

He said, “I love you too, Hannah.”

He didn't last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went.

Lyda and Andy Catlett and I were with him when he died. It was about suppertime, still daylight, the sun and the wind in the perfect new maple leaves outside the window. A dove called, somewhere off toward town a screen door slammed, and he was gone.

After the stillness had come and was complete, I telephoned Margaret. She was here in just over an hour with her suitcase packed. She had been expecting the call. Caleb was here early the next morning, having given up on sleep sometime before midnight and come on, leaving Alice to come the next day. He was quiet, steady, helpful, sweet as always, and, I could tell, grieved to the bone.

It was still the middle of the afternoon, office hours, on the West Coast when I called Mattie. I couldn't get any living human at his office, and so I left a message on his recording machine: “Mattie, this is your momma. Your dad died a while ago. Call me up.”

He called back in about an hour. He wanted to come home, he said,
he would give anything to be here. But he was too much involved right then in things that depended on him, that he just couldn't get out of. In fact, he was shortly to leave on a trip to China for a meeting with business people there, an opportunity that might not come again. He was giving me the picture of a man snarled in a tangle, helpless to get free.

I knew that he didn't have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine.

I knew too that it was more than he could bear. He is in a way given over to machines, but he is not a machine himself. Right then, he could not bear the thought of coming back to stand even for a few hours by his dead father in the emptiness he once had filled. He said he would come as soon as he could.

 

There was a time when Port William drew its members into itself every Saturday night to shop, trade, talk, court, play, argue, loaf, or whatever else they had to be together in order to do. Now Port William, or what is left of it, is most likely to assemble, not in Port William at all, but in the Tacker Funeral Home in Hargrave. The survivors of the old life come to pay their respects. The neighbors, old and young, come. People who have moved away, maybe a long time ago, come back. You see people you knew when you were young and now don't recognize, people who may never come back again, people you may never see again. We feel the old fabric torn, pulling apart, and we know how much we have loved each other.

I greeted them all, standing by Nathan's coffin, with Margaret, Caleb and Alice, Lyda and Danny, the Catlett brothers and their wives standing with me or always somewhere near. The kin and the friends and the neighbors filed past. I took their hands, received their hugs, their smiles, their kind tears, their words of comfort: