Hannah Coulter (9 page)

She said to me one day when I was correcting Little Margaret for something that didn't much matter, “Honey, there are some things it's just better not to see.”

Another time, when I had said, “I don't want to spoil her,” Mrs. Feltner said, “Oh, Hannah, I always like to see 'em spoiled a
little bit.
It means somebody loves 'em.”

Soon enough Little Margaret was three years old, one of us, and Virgil was three years gone.

 

After we lost Virgil, I grieved for our unknowing love, and for the life we might have lived if we had been allowed to live it. I so much wanted what was lost. It had turned out to be only a hopeless hope, a dream, but I wanted it.

Grieved as I was, half destroyed as I sometimes felt myself to be, I didn't get mad about Virgil's death. Who was there to get mad at? It would be like getting mad at the world, or at God. What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say. Was Virgil a hero? In his dying was he willing to die, or glad to sacrifice his life? Is the life and freedom of the living a satisfactory payment to the dead in war for their dying? Would Virgil think so? I have imagined that he would. But I don't know. Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever “missing”? Who can speak for a young man gone clean out of the world, whose body was maybe blown all to nothing, in the midst of terrible fear or pain, in the midst of his last prayer?

What I know is this. Virgil loved his life. He loved me. He loved his family. He did not want to die. He wanted to come home and live with me and raise a family, and farm with his dad. He knew we were going to have a baby. He never knew he had a daughter. He never knew her name.

I don't mean to be quarrelsome, but the dead are helpless. I was the mother of a helpless baby, and the wife of a dead man who was just as helpless. The living must protect the dead. Their lives made the meaning of their deaths, and that is the meaning their deaths ought to have. I hated for Virgil's death to be made official. I hated for it to be a government property or a public thing. I felt my grief for him made his death his own. My grief was the last meaning of his life in this world. And so I kept my grief. For a long time I couldn't give it up.

 

There have been times, then and later too, when I thought I could cry forever. But I haven't done it. There was war and rumors of war. “There was war in Heaven once,” as Aunt Fanny would sometimes remind us. But there was something else too.

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones. Little Margaret was calling me into life. A little ahead of me in time still, Nathan would be calling me into life.

At first, as the months went by, it was shameful to me when I would realize that without my consent, almost without my knowledge, something had made me happy. And then I learned to think, when those times would come, “Well, go ahead. If you're happy, then
be
happy.” No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come, and they came from ordinary pleasures in ordinary things: the baby, sunlight, breezes, animals and birds, daily work, rest when I was tired, food, strands of fog in the hollows early in the morning, butterflies, flowers. The flowers didn't have to be dahlias and roses either, but just the weeds blooming in the fields, the daisies and the yarrow. I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought
to want. And so, unknowingly, I was being prepared for Nathan and for my life with him, when that time would come.

Virgil was missing, and nobody ever found him or learned what happened to him. And the girl I was when I fell in love with him and married him began to be missing too, becoming a memory along with him. I was changing, and the world was changing. I was going on into time, where Virgil no longer was. Now, looking back after so many years, I still can recognize that young couple, I know them well, and I pity them for their lost life. But I am no longer one of them. Those lovers fled away a long time ago.

I need to tell about my people in their grief. I don't think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. We know that every night, war or no war, there are people lying awake grieving, and every morning there are people waking up to absences that never will be filled. But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is “Fine.” There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to “How are you?” is “Fine.”

The thing you have most dreaded has happened at last. The worst thing you might have expected has happened, and you didn't expect it. You have grown old and ill, and most of those you have loved are dead or gone away. Even so:

“How're you?”

“Fine. How're you?”

“Fine.”

There is always some shame and fear in this, I think, shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief, and fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else's. But this is a kind of courtesy too and a kind of honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary. And there is something else: an honoring of the
solitude in which the grief you have to bear will have to be borne. Should you fall on your neighbor's shoulder and weep in the midst of work? Should you go to the store with tears on your face? No. You are fine.

And yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end. Once in a while we hear it sung out in a hymn, when every throat seems suddenly widened with love and a common longing:

We all know what that beautiful shore is. It is Port William with all its loved ones come home alive.

 

My life with Virgil was a romance, because it never had a chance to become anything else. We were a courting couple, and then we were newlyweds in the shadow of war, and then the war separated us forever. We became only a pretty memory, and now I am the last of its rememberers. Oh, maybe the Catlett boys still remember, but they were too young then to have remembered much. Andy, I hope you do remember, at least a little.

My life with Nathan turned out to be a long life, an actual marriage, with trouble in it. I am not complaining. Troubles came, as they were bound to do, as the promise we made had warned us that they would. I can remember the troubles and speak of them, but not to complain. I am beginning again to speak of my gratitude.

By the time Virgil went into the army, Mr. Feltner and Joe Banion were getting old. Jarrat and Burley Coulter began raising most of Mr. Feltner's crops on the shares, and it was a good thing. He needed their help. He needed their company too. Their losses in the war had made them close, and especially a friendship grew between Mr. Feltner and Burley that was dear and necessary to them.

Jarrat and Burley would often be at work on the Feltner place, and after he was discharged and came home, Nathan would be with them. I was about to say that at first he was nothing to me, but that is not quite right. In Port William, back then, nobody was exactly nothing to anybody.
I knew Nathan had been in the war, in the hard fighting in the Pacific at the last. I knew he had lost his brother in the war, and now he had come home to farm with his father and his uncle.

I knew too that the Coulter family had come to a strange pass, having dwindled to a widower and two bachelors, living in two houses on adjoining farms, Burley and Nathan in one and Jarrat alone in the other. Jarrat had lived alone ever since the death of his wife when the boys were young, because that was the way it suited him to live. Burley, according to gossip, had a sweetheart, a might-as-well-be-wife, Kate Helen Branch, and a said-to-be son by her, Danny Branch, but Burley didn't live with them or they with him. What Nathan was doing for company, female or otherwise, I didn't know, and for a long time I didn't wonder. What he was doing was picking up girls at the Rosebud Cafe down at Hargrave, as lonely Port William men have often done. I didn't know it then, and if I had I wouldn't have cared. Well, I don't care yet.

He was not nothing to me, but he didn't matter to me either.

But sometimes my grief for Virgil would become mingled with grief for myself. I didn't want to be selfish. In the midst of so much grief, mine and other people's, I feared the guilt of wanting anything for myself. I had little Margaret to look after and think about and enjoy. Though I had quit working away from home, I was busy every day about the place with Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion. So much was a plenty. My conscience told me it was enough and more than enough. And yet time didn't stop, life didn't stop, we learned to believe that “missing” had to mean “dead,” month after month separated us from the last we would ever know of Virgil, and in time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

That was how Nathan began to matter to me. For a long time after he was home, I looked on him just as a fixture of the life of Port William as it had reshaped itself after the war. But if nobody can ever quite be nothing to you in Port William, then everybody finally has got to be something to you. It took a while. Nathan was a quiet man and not a forward one. To me, he was somebody off on the edge of things, which seemed to content him well enough. But I began to know him. When the men
would be working together, I would sometimes carry water to them, or sometimes even dinner if they were working far from the house. Or we would be feeding a harvest crew, and he would be with them. He became a presence to me. It was his presence that gave me the feeling that I was going to waste.

Maybe that was because he seemed so clearly to be going to waste himself. Maybe he wasn't settled at home yet, but it seemed he was just there, just doing whatever he needed to do, which I guessed was the way he had been and done in the army. By then, of course, I knew about the Rosebud girls. One reason nobody could be nothing to you in Port William in those days was that you couldn't help knowing at least something about everybody. I was a little older than Nathan—two years, a long time when you are young—and maybe I felt sort of motherly toward him. He clearly wasn't a settled man or a very happy one. Maybe it didn't occur to me that I was going to waste because
he
thought I was. What
I
thought was, “He needs a woman. He needs a woman of his own. He needs a wife.” This seemed merely what anybody would have thought, looking at Nathan as he was then. And in fact, one day when we were finishing up in the kitchen after feeding dinner to the Coulters and some others, Mrs. Feltner said, “I just don't feel like Nathan's as happy as he ought to be. What he needs is a wife.”

Nettie Banion said, “Yessum, he does. He needs to buy him some meat and bring it home!”

 

I could say he gradually assumed a sort of standing in my eyes. He had the hardiness of his father and uncle, their indifference to bad weather, and their sufferance of whatever work or difficulty had come or would come. He was absolutely loyal to them. When they were at work, he was. He was a fine hand. I knew that Mr. Feltner respected him. And young as he was, he clearly had a love of farming that was his own. He was quiet, he never put himself forward, but he was
there.
You couldn't not notice him. And just as slowly as he became a presence to me, I became aware that I was present to him. I knew it by the way he was looking at me.

Nathan was a beautiful man. In my heart and memory he will always be beautiful, but in those days nobody could have missed it. In his quietness and in other ways, he took after his father, but in his looks he
resembled Burley. Looking at Nathan, you could imagine how Burley had looked as a young man. He wasn't overly tall, but he was broadshouldered and strongly made without looking in any way thick. He was as clean cut as a sapling. He wore his clothes and ate and drank in a way that told you he would be offended by anything slovenly.

But his best beauty was in his face, mostly in his eyes. From the time I was first aware of him, I never caught him sneaking a look. He looked at you with a look that was entirely direct, entirely clear. His look said, “Here I am, as I am, like it or not.” There was no apology in his look and no plea, but there was purpose. When he began to look at me with purpose, I felt myself beginning to change. It was not a look a woman would want to look back at unless she was ready to take off her clothes. I was aware of that look a long time before I was ready to look back. I knew that when I did I would be a goner. We both would be. We would be given over to a time that would be ours together, and we could not know what it would be.

When I finally did look back at him, it was lovely beyond the telling of this world, and it was almost terrible. After that, we were going into the dark. We understood, and we were scared, and I wanted nothing more than to go into the dark with him.