Hannah Coulter (10 page)

I was beautiful in those days myself, as I believe I can admit now that it no longer matters. A woman doesn't learn she is beautiful by looking in a mirror, which about any woman is apt to do from time to time, but that is only wishing. She learns it so that she actually knows it from men. The way they look at her makes a sort of glimmer she walks in. That tells her. It changes the way she walks too. But now I was a mother and a widow. It had been a longish while since I had thought of being beautiful, but Nathan's looks were reminding me that I was.

To know that Nathan was thinking such thoughts mattered to me. It mattered to me whether or not I was willing to let it matter, and I wasn't willing. I was unwilling, and I was afraid. In spite of myself, I felt myself changing, but I was afraid to change. I didn't want to be carried away from my old love for Virgil, which I thought my grief preserved, or from my loyalty, which I deeply owed and felt, to him and his family. I was afraid of the unknown, even of my own life that was unfinished and going on.

Nathan began to speak to me, not in a friendly way in passing, in front of company, but as he got or made the chances he began to say things to me that were meant for me alone.

The first thing he ever said in that way was, “Hannah, there's going to be a dance down to Hargrave. I want you to go with me, and I think you ought to let me take you.”

Just like that. He wasn't handing me a “line,” for sure. It wasn't a request. It was hardly even polite. He had made up his mind and he was telling me, take it or leave it. He wasn't offering me a “date.” He was offering me himself, as he was.

I had never called him by name. I said, “I don't think so.”

He didn't ask me why. He didn't look or sound regretful. Just a little on the kind side of carelessly, he said, “Well. All right.”

He was going to have to make do with the Rosebud girls a while longer, but he had troubled me.

He knew he had. After a time or two, he gave up asking me to go out with him, understanding, I think, the difficulty of that for me. How could I think of going out on dates from the house I had lived in with Virgil, that I still lived in with his parents, the house where Mr. and Mrs. Feltner had so freely made me at home? But after that he continued to talk to me. And I continued to listen, and even sometimes to say something in return. I still looked at him only in glances. It wasn't going to be easy for me to look straight back at that look of his. It would not be easy and it would not be soon. But it became easy to call him Nathan and to listen to him and to answer. I liked him. I had better go ahead and say I loved him, risky as it is to use that word so soon. Your first love for somebody can last, and this one did, but it changes too after promises have been made and time has passed and knowledge has come. But even then, even before the beginning, I loved him. When I felt him looking at me with that look, I felt it like a touch.

 

It was a strange courtship we had. My love for Virgil had begun in a kind of innocence, leading only in time to knowledge. But what was coming into being between Nathan and me was not a youthful romance. It was a knowing love. Both of us had suffered the war. He had fought in it, and I had waited it out in fear and sorrow at home. We both were losers by it,
he of a brother, I of a husband. Now we were coming together out of fear and loss and grief, and we knew it. Each of us knew that the other knew it. That was why Nathan was so direct with me. It was why I kept holding him off. For the time being we were seeing differently, but we were seeing the same thing. We weren't fooling around.

When he would speak to me in our brief encounters in passing, what he was trying to tell me, what he was letting me see though he couldn't tell me, was what he wanted and how much he wanted it. He wanted me. He made that plain enough, and without any roundabout. He was waiting only for my permission, and when I gave it I would know what to expect.

But he wanted more than me. He wanted a life for us to live and a place for us to live it in. I can see it as I saw it then, and I can see it as I know it now. He had gone to the war and lived through it, and he had come home changed. He saw Port William as he never would have seen it if he had never left and had never fought. He came home to these ridges and hillsides and bottomlands and woods and streams that he had known ever since he was born. And this place, more than all the places he had seen in his absence, was what he wanted. It was what he had learned to want in the midst of killing and dying, terror, cruelty, hate, hunger, thirst, blood, and fire.

But this was not a simple desire. In order to have the place, he needed me. In order to have me, he needed the place. He knew these things because he was no longer a simple man. He had come to his desire by going through everything that was opposed to it. Nathan plainly wasn't trying to make it big in the “postwar world.” He wasn't
going
anywhere. He had come back home after the war because he wanted to. He was where he wanted to be. As I too was by then, he was a member of Port William. Members of Port William aren't trying to “get someplace.” They think they
are
someplace.

Watching him and watching myself in my memory now, I know again what I knew before, but now I know more than that. Now I know what we were trying to stand for, and what I believe we did stand for: the possibility that among the world's wars and sufferings two people could love each other for a long time, until death and beyond, and could make a place for each other that would be a part of their love, as their love for
each other would be a way of loving their place. This love would be one of the acts of the greater love that holds and cherishes all the world.

By a long detour through the hell that humans have learned to make, Nathan had come home. He came back to Port William and to me, to the home and household we made, to his family and friends, to our children yet to be born. And of course he came back to loss, to the absence of those who did not come back, and of those who would leave.

There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be. After he came home, I think Nathan tried to make such a place, and in his unspeaking way to live such a life. Maybe by 1948 I knew already, or I knew before long, that before he went to the army he had been a hunter. After he came home, he gave away his guns. We never had a gun in our house.

In the early spring of 1948, Nathan bought the old Cuthbert place that fronted on the Sand Ripple Road and joined the Feltner place at the back. There were practical reasons for this. Jarrat's farm, which adjoined the Coulter home place, was small, only about seventy-five acres, much of it wooded slopes that weren't farmable. The home place, where Burley lived, was about three times as big, but its future was put into question by Burley's irregular family life and by the existence of his son, Danny Branch, who was then sixteen years old.

So Nathan bought the Cuthbert place, because it was for sale and was what he could afford. That is, he had enough in savings to get the title, a mortgage, and an old rundown farm. He had bought a lot of work. The Cuthbert place had been owned jointly by three generations of Cuthbert heirs who had never been able to agree to sell it but had simply subdivided their interest in it as their numbers increased. There were people in various distant places who every year received one thirty-fourth of half of whatever income the place brought. I had written some of those checks myself when I worked for Wheeler Catlett, who was the executor of the estate. During the war, except for two or three plowlands, the place had been almost abandoned. There were still a few old rock fences on it that were in fair shape. The wire fences were just remnants and patches. Nothing had been repaired or painted for years. Most of the buildings, including the house, were fixable, but whoever was going to
fix them was going to have to hurry. There were some wide, well-lying ridges on it, in some places gullied and overgrown, in others not so bad. There were some fine old sugar maples around the house.

Port William had ideas, of course, about what could be done with such a place, and about what Nathan would do with it, and Port William discussed these matters thoroughly, as it always did. It was also mystified:

I knew pretty well what he was
planning
to do for a woman, but it was not easy knowing. In my heart, I wanted to be the woman, but I had a lot to give up before I could be. So did Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

 

I knew they were worrying about me. People know more about each other than what they tell each other, and I knew that certain things were obvious. For three years I had led the life almost of an old woman. I had no life beyond the house and the place and the church and the family visits I made with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. For a long time I didn't need my own life as a young woman. When I began again to feel such a need, fear made it easy to push aside. I feared for myself, and I feared too for Mr. and Mrs. Feltner. Little Margaret was as much a part of their lives as she was of mine. How could I think of parting from them, of putting asunder what had for so long belonged together? I could let my thoughts go to Nathan, but I couldn't think of going to him myself. Mr. and Mrs. Feltner had been parents and friends to me, a refuge in time of trouble. What could I tell them?

One day when Mr. Feltner came in early for dinner, he washed his hands and came on into the living room where I was. I was embroidering a row of flowers across the bodice of a new Sunday dress I had made for Little Margaret. It was close work and I didn't look up. I heard his footsteps. They paused when he came into the room and saw me, and then they came on. He stopped by my chair. He leaned down and laid his hand on my shoulder and made me look up at him. He had tears in his
eyes. For a minute we just looked at each other, and then as if in answer to something I had said, or in answer to what he knew I wanted to say, he said, “I know. I know. But, my good girl, you have got to
live.
”

He had given me permission. But it was more than that. It was an instruction. It was his wish. I knew he spoke for Mrs. Feltner too. They weren't holding me. They didn't want fear to hold me, for myself or for them. They hadn't known what to do. But now they saw that a life apart from theirs was asking for me. If I wanted it, they wanted me to have it. But they meant more than that. Mr. Feltner was telling me, at his cost, for my sake, what Grandmam had told me eight years before: “You need to go.”

And so he raised the dare. If I hadn't cared for Nathan, maybe it wouldn't have mattered. But I did care, and it did matter. The only thing standing now between Nathan and what he wanted was this scared woman looking the other way. To turn to Nathan, to look to him, would be to give my life to the world again. A burnt child shuns the fire. But now I had the feeling that I was expected. I would have to go. I wanted to go. But even sorrow has its pride. Even desire does.

Maybe the world is waiting for you to give yourself to it. Maybe it's only then that things can work themselves out. The next chance Nathan caught, he said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Well, start talking,” I said.

“Not here.”

“Where?”

“Over at the Cuthbert place. Up on the ridge there. Behind the house.”

“When?”

“Late this evening. After supper.”

“Maybe I will.”

Because I needed to walk and to be alone, I often made a quiet wander after supper. I like that time of day. I like to see the country lying still under the changing light and the coming darkness.

It wasn't far, half a mile maybe, back across the ridges toward the opening of the river valley that I could see from the highest ground. At the ramshackle line fence I stepped over from a good farm, well kept for a long time, onto a poor place covered with the marks and signs of neglect. I had to pick my way then, following old grazing paths among
young cedar and redbud and locust trees and patches of sumac and blackberry briars. But I knew where the old house was and the ridge behind it, and my winding way took me there. The sun was down. As I walked, the moist evening air bore up around me the good weedy smell of the old pasture.

Nathan was standing among some cedars about as tall as he was. He had heard me coming, or he had known the direction the overgrowth would force me to come from, if I came, for he was facing me. He was standing as quietly as the trees. I was close to him before I saw him, and then I stopped.

It would be a while before either of us moved. But now I was facing him. We were looking straight at each other. I felt a shiver go over me, but I didn't move. I could have cried, but I didn't cry. I had not returned his look before. And now he smiled and nodded, as if to thank me.

And then we looked away from each other. Nathan turned a little and we looked down the slope toward the paintless old house and barns and outbuildings. It was getting dark.

Finally he said, “Well, what would you call this?”

“I guess,” I said, “you'd still have to call it a farm.”

He said, “It'll never be what it was. It could be better than it is.”

We had a little conversation then about the place, what it needed, what could be done, what it offered.

I said, “It, plus what you see in it, plus what you want from it, could be a farm.”

He turned and looked at me again. I could hardly see his eyes, but I felt his look.