Hannah Coulter (18 page)

Mathew Burley Coulter, our Mattie, had the right middle name, I guess. With him, I came nearest to having a Burley Coulter to raise. He was a fun-loving boy, fine-looking, a little too attractive to girls when the time came for that, a little too eager to climb Fool's Hill. He had a wild streak in him, maybe, but it was my consolation that he could have been a lot wilder than he was. He could have been as wild as Burley Coulter, except for one thing: He had a mind that was studious. He could be attracted and pacified by the sort of things they teach in school. His interest ran to mathematics and science and to fixing things. From about the time he started into high school, whenever any of the equipment needed fixing, his daddy just handed it over to him.

He got good grades in school and satisfied his teachers, but what he learned seemed to have less and less to do with school. If there was
something to be learned, especially in a subject he liked, he learned it. If they assigned him a textbook, he learned what was in it. But he was going ahead more or less on his own, just interested and eager.

At home he was a fascinating boy to be around and watch, he was so intent on what he was interested in and so good at it. As for farming, he did the work he was expected to do, and that was all. He did exactly what he was told to do, right up to the line, and no more. He wouldn't see work and do it on his own. Nathan would teach and prompt and occasionally plead and sometimes give him hell direct. But Mattie was looking away. He wasn't interested.

Nathan said, “I don't know what he's going to turn into. But he's not a farmer now and I'll be surprised if he ever is one.”

Mattie was the only one of the three that Nathan and I ever really disagreed over. Nathan had good eyes and I trusted them, but I couldn't make myself care enough that Mattie should look with Nathan's eyes and see what he saw. Nathan cared plenty, and he could be awfully impatient and short with Mattie. Mattie dealt with this by getting away or, if he couldn't get away, by shutting up. They weren't always at odds, but when they were the space between them was occupied by, of course, me. And of course they complained to me about each other. And of course, loving them both, I tried to defend them to each other. The good part was that I
could
defend them to each other.

“Maybe
you
are the one who'll have to have the patience,” I would say to Mattie. “Maybe you're the one who'll have to try harder. But your daddy loves you, you know. Whatever you're doing, right or wrong, and whatever you're thinking about him, he loves you.”

That was the truth, and Mattie knew it. He wouldn't argue.

To Nathan I said, “I just think you need to be more patient with him. And with yourself too.”

And he, who
would
argue, said, “All I want is to see that kid do one day's work because he wants to and not because he has to. That's the only difference I'm asking for, but it's one that matters.”

“Well, maybe you've got to expect less. Or expect something else. He's not you. He's maybe never going to see what you see or want what you want.”

“Then, damn it to hell,
you
deal with him.”

“I
will
deal with him. I've dealt with him since before he was born, and I'm
going
to deal with him. And so are you. Listen, he's a good boy. He loves you, whether he shows it or not. And you love him. He's your
son.
”

 

Well, when Mattie finally grew all his feathers and flew off to the university, it broke my heart again, but it was a relief. I know it was a relief to him. And in different ways it was a relief to Nathan and me. It was
his
life that Mattie was living in after that, not ours. And once he was out from underfoot, Nathan was proud of him, for he did well.

He was proud of him but skeptical too, or maybe just sort of resigned. Mattie, anyhow, pretty quickly went beyond us. He studied electrical engineering, and then he got interested in communications technology and information technology, things he couldn't talk to us about because we knew so little.

Once, Nathan asked me, “Communication of
what?
”

I said, “God knows what.”

And that was about the extent of our conversation on that subject. We didn't know what.

He was in graduate school a while, and then he lit out for the West Coast where he had been offered a high-paying, high-technological job. He was exceptional, and of course we were proud. But we were left behind too. We gave him up to whatever he was going to do.

He has been on the West Coast ever since. Now he is the CEO, as he puts it, of an information-processing company whose name is made of letters that don't spell anything. What he does I leave it to him to know. He is earning a lot of money and flying here and there about the world. He calls up maybe twice a month, but he doesn't come back often. Sometimes he sends a letter, usually a letter dictated to a secretary and signed, you can tell, with a bunch of other letters: “Very truly yours, M. B. Coulter.” And I will laugh, for he is still going on in a hurry from one thing to another without looking back, the way he always did.

Once a year, maybe, he will bring his current family for a visit. It will be his vacation. Or rather part of his vacation. They fly to Cincinnati or Louisville, rent a car, and drive here on their way to or from someplace else.

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was
formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.

He fits my love, but he no longer fits the place or our life or the knowledge of anything here. Since a long time ago, when he has come back he has come as a stranger. He and his wife and their children and I are strangers. We spend two or three days trying mightily to be nice to one another, and even succeeding, but we remain strangers. We don't know the same things. We have nothing in common to talk about. We don't always agree about the news, and so we avoid that. I ask about their lives, but they have little confidence that I can understand their lives, and they don't tell me much. The conversation, to keep itself going, keeps circling back to Port William, to things Mattie remembers, to people he used to know—memories, you can tell, that seem a little odd to him now, as if from another life—while his wife smiles and pretends to be interested, and the children play on the floor with the toys they have brought and pay no attention.

Mattie has four children by two wives, and between those two there was another woman he was at least traveling with. All Nathan and I ever knew of her was what Mattie told us when he introduced her: “Folks, this is Helen.”

Though we kept on calling him “Mattie,” and I still do, the name fits him as poorly now as he fits this place. We have no other name for him, but he doesn't look right for the name. He looks like somebody expecting to be called “Mr. Coulter.” His present wife calls him “M.B.”

He has too much honesty to pretend to be interested in whatever is happening here on the place. Farming is behind him now, and it is completely behind him. He was always looking away, and now when he is here it appears really that he doesn't see where he is. His children, as they have come along, have picked this up from him. When they are here they don't know where they are. And maybe it is not possible for them to find out. They don't want to know.

The oldest pair of Mattie's children are grown up now, and I haven't seen them for a long time. The youngest pair, two boys, are now twelve
and thirteen. Like their older brother and sister, they would spend their whole visit in the house or on the porch if I would let them. They bring games that they play on the little computer they always have with them. They play their games or they sit and watch television. Before they come and while they're here I think of things to show them: a new calf, a hawk's nest, the old hollow tree. I take them fishing in the ponds. I take them out to help me in the garden or the henhouse. I send them out to see whatever the Branches are doing. It all somehow fails. They don't much like any of it. By no fault of theirs, they don't know enough to like it. They don't know the things that I and even their daddy have known since before we knew anything.

And what ever in their lives will they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?

My love for Mattie's children was made in my love for Mattie, but it was also made in Port William. It doesn't fit the children, who had their making elsewhere, and they don't fit it. It is a failed love, and hard to bear. For me, it is hard to bear. The children don't notice, of course, and don't mind.

When they leave I am sad to see them go, and I am sad that it should seem right that they should be gone.

Margaret was a bright girl, a top student, and she has always had plenty of sense. Mattie has always had the reputation of being “brilliant,” and maybe he is. Maybe he has made enough money to prove it. But I am not a good authority on Mattie. He has gone beyond about everything I know. I don't know if I am right or wrong in wishing, as I sometimes do, that he had more sense.

The tale of Caleb is maybe the most complicated of the three. As a boy Caleb never wanted to be in school, though he has wound up in school for life, or at least for life until retirement. I am not sure how smart Caleb is. He is not “brilliant,” maybe, and yet he seems always to have been as smart as he has wanted to be.

He didn't want to be in school, when he was a boy, because he wanted to be here, at home. He wanted to be at work with his daddy, which he was, on every day that Nathan would let him come along, from the time he could walk until he started to school. Nathan had more to do with raising Caleb than I did. I would have made a momma's boy of him, maybe, if he had let me. He was the last. But his natural calling, I think, was to be a farmer. Farming was what he played at before he could work at it. When he got big enough to work, he liked the work. Farming was what he thought about and dreamed about. He loved it. When Mattie
would be doing what was expected of him, no more, and getting away, Caleb would do his work and then look around for something else that needed to be done.

When he was just a little thing, if the work permitted it, he would be out with his dad, and maybe Jarrat and Burley too, trying to do as they did. If he got sleepy, Nathan would put him down for a nap at the field edge or on the seat of his pickup, or if the weather was too bad for that, he would come carrying him back to the house asleep. When he was supposed to be staying at the house with me, if I didn't watch, he would run away to find the men at work. Before he started to school he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.

He was the one who raised the orphan lambs. He always wanted to have his own hen and chickens. Nathan would give him the runt pigs, and he would feed and care for them in his own pen. He had a bank account by the time he was nine. When he was fourteen, we gave him an acre of tobacco to raise for himself. He dealt with school the way Mattie dealt with the farm, doing what was required and no more, except for the agriculture courses and the Future Farmers of America. He loved to have “projects.” He did his schoolwork without too much effort, made his C's and a few B's as if they were exactly what he wanted, caused probably only a normal amount of trouble, fell in and out of love with a girl or two, but the school he was really interested in attending was here. He was his daddy's student. He never thought of being anything but a farmer.

So our hope that we might give this place a true inheritor and ourselves a successor naturally fell on Caleb. You could say even that he invited our hope and gladly accepted it. He was a sweet-natured boy, kind-hearted and generous, and I think he liked the thought of pleasing us. When his time came to go up to the university, his plan was to study agriculture and come home to farm.

He was the youngest, the last, and I hated to see him go. I loved him, I guess, the way mothers usually love their youngest, and he was easy to love, but I was worried about him too. He had been so uninterested and unworried in his schooling so far that I was afraid he would go into those high-powered classes at the university and fail.

I caught him by himself when he was getting ready to leave and laid
down the law, which I hadn't needed to do with either of the others. I said, “Listen. Don't go up there and try to get by with a lick and a promise. You're going up there to study, so study. If you do badly the first semester, don't expect us to help you with the next one.”

Not every boy would have taken that in a good spirit. Mattie wouldn't have. But Caleb tried to console me. He said, “Momma, don't worry,” and gave me a very kind hug.

Anytime an eighteen-year-old boy tells you not to worry, you had better worry. And I did. As it turned out, though, I was wasting my time. Caleb went up there and became what he had never been before, a good student. He made whatever struggle he had to make. His grades were decent at first, and they got better as he went along.

When the distance began to open up for Caleb I am not quite sure. He got a scholarship in the college of agriculture. Because of research projects that he was helping with, his visits home became shorter. In the summer before his senior year he didn't come home. I began to have this uneasy feeling that he was doing too well. I felt so foolish in that thought that I didn't mention it to Nathan. I barely had the nerve to mention it to myself.