Hannah Coulter (19 page)

 

Oftentimes after it no longer matters whether things are clear or not, they become clear. After not liking school at all, Caleb had got to liking it too much, more anyhow than I would have wanted him to, if I had had any say. He liked knowing the things he was learning. He was beginning to learn the ways of research, and he liked that. He was, maybe you could say, tempted by it.

And I know, I can almost hear, the voices that were speaking to him, voices of people he had learned to respect, and they were saying, “Caleb, you're too bright to be a farmer.”

They were saying, “Caleb, there's no future for you in farming.”

They were saying, “Caleb, why should you be a farmer yourself when you can do so much for farmers? You can be a help to your people.”

These were the voices of farm-raised people who were saying, “Caleb, why go home and work your ass off for what you'll earn? Things are going to get worse for farmers.” And they were true prophets. The farmers were at the bottom of the heap. And there were fewer of them, farming worse and earning less every year. How could you argue with those
voices? How could you look straight at your boy and argue that he ought to spend his life at the hardest work, worrying about money and the weather?

I don't think there is an argument for being a farmer. There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love. Necessity ends the argument, and so does love. Caleb didn't need to farm. Going to school had removed the need. With the need gone, he still had love, but he didn't have enough. Once again, I had felt the distance opening. I had seen the writing on the wall. And Nathan ought to have seen it. I should have helped him to see it.

Caleb came home the day after he graduated. And that day Nathan did the only really foolish thing I ever saw him do. I didn't see it coming. I didn't know it was going to happen until it had already started happening, and I couldn't help.

Nathan came to the house for dinner just at noon, the way he always did. He hung his hat on the hook by the back door and washed his hands at the sink. I took up the biscuits, and the three of us, Nathan and Caleb and I, sat down in our old places to eat.

Nobody said much of anything for a few minutes, and then Nathan looked across the table at Caleb with that point-blank look he had when there was something to be dealt with. He said, “Caleb, we've talked before, and now it's time to talk again. I've been thinking about what we have to offer you here, and what we can do for you.”

All of a sudden I knew a lot more than I had thought I did. Nathan had fooled himself, and he was afraid he had fooled himself, and now he was begging Caleb to tell him that he hadn't fooled himself. The cold ache of dread settled into the pit of my stomach, and I laid down my fork.

“There's this place here,” Nathan said. “Your mother and I aren't going to live forever. Sooner or later it's going to need a younger man. And there's your sister's place that I'm taking care of; it can use a younger man right now. And there's my daddy's little place that was left to me; that can be yours just as soon as we can make the arrangements. Sooner or later you'll want to get married, and when you do, we can fix up the old house over there. It'll be your place. Later, maybe, you'll want to move here.”

Caleb had turned white. He had raised his glass but he had not carried
it all the way to his mouth. He set it back down. Poor boy. He had changed his mind, and he hadn't told us. He had put it off, thinking it would become easy. He would think of a way to make it easy. He hoped we would figure it out.

When he spoke, he sounded alarmed, as if only then he realized what he had to tell. “But, Dad, I'm not here to stay. I'm not going to be coming home. I've been offered a scholarship to a graduate school. I've accepted.”

There was nothing more to say, Caleb didn't need a graduate degree to be a farmer, and Nathan didn't say anything. He went on eating. He had his work to do, and he needed to get back to it. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed and ran down. I don't think he noticed he was crying.

 

That was as near to licked as I ever saw him. Even his death didn't come as near to beating him as that did. Afterwards, for a long time he was just awfully quiet. He wasn't angry. Really, he was never much for anger. But it was a hard time. He had lost something he needed, something his place and his family needed. That was 1974. Elton Penn had died that spring, and we were already grieved. Nathan had more on his mind than he could find words for. So did I. I would talk to him, and he would answer pleasantly enough, but we didn't speak of what was bothering us the most. Maybe we didn't need to. It couldn't have been “talked out.” It had to be worn out. But all through that time I had an absurd yearning to shelter Nathan from what had already happened.

Troubled about himself, I think, and sorry for his dad and for me, Caleb lived at home and helped us through that summer. Before the crop was all in the barn, he left for his graduate school in the Midwest.

And so they were gone, all three. And so they still are gone.

 

For a while, especially if you have children, you shape your life according to expectations. That is arguably pretty foolish, for expectation can be a bucketful of smoke. Nobody expected Elton to die. He was only fifty-four. Nobody expected Caleb, who loved to farm, to spend his life in school. But there is some pleasure in expectations too, and I should not be regretful about ours.

After your expectations have gone their way and your future is getting
along the best it can as an honest blank, you shape your life according to what it is. Nathan was fifty in 1974. He was probably as strong as he had ever been, and I would say smarter. He had a lot of years still ahead of him.
We
had a lot of years still ahead of
us.
It was up to us then to make them good, and we did.

One night, after Caleb had left and we had got well into the fall, Nathan and I were sitting at the table after supper. We were tired. Neither of us had said anything for a long time. It had got dark but we hadn't turned on a light.

And then Nathan said, “Hannah, my old girl, we're going to live right on. We'll love each other, and take care of things here, and we'll be all right.”

“Yes,” I said. “We're going to love each other, and we'll be all right.”

I got up and went to him then.

 

And what of Caleb? Caleb eventually became Dr. Coulter. He became a professor, teaching agriculture to fewer and fewer students who were actually going to farm. He became an expert with a laboratory and experimental plots, a man of reputation.

But as I know, and as he knows in his own heart and thoughts, Caleb is incomplete. He didn't love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can't hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is always trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.

He can leave his office on Friday afternoon and drive here in just a few hours, and then drive back again in just a few hours on Sunday afternoon. He often has done that, almost from the time he took his present job. Every chance he got, it seemed, he would be here, if only just overnight, or for only a few hours on his way someplace else or on his way home, to see how we were and if he could do anything for us. Since his daddy's death, he has come more often than before. Too often, I try to tell him, for a married man with a job and responsibilities.

Maybe it was because of his feeling of unfinished responsibilities here that he didn't marry until he was thirty-four. He married Alice Hamilton, who goes by that name. She is a vice president in a pretty large bank. I like her. As a rule, she knows what she thinks and means what she says. She is self-respecting and courteous. She appreciates Caleb's goodness, which she ought to do, and she is kind to me. She sometimes comes here with Caleb on his visits, but not often. And sometimes she says things to the effect that you can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy, which I
don't
like. I gather that with her and their circle of friends, Caleb enjoys the reputation of being a country boy. He is Alice's boy. They have no children.

They both have done well, and they live well. Caleb is well respected, and I am glad of that. He brings me what he calls his “publications,” written in the Unknown Tongue. He wants me to be proud of them. And I am, but with the sadness of wishing I could be prouder.

I read all of his publications that he brings me, and I have to say that they don't make me happy. I can't hear Caleb talking in them. And they speak of everything according to its general classification. Reading them always makes me think of this farm and how it has emerged, out of “agriculture” and its “soil types” and its collection of “species,” as itself, our place, a place like no other, yielding to Nathan and me a life like no other.

 

One of the things that Nathan disliked and feared the most was even the idea of being an employee. Except for his time in the army, he was never “employed” in his life, and he would do everything he could to avoid employing anybody. He hated the idea of working for a boss, and he hated being a boss. Freedom, to him, was being free of being bossed and of being a boss.

He loved the old free work-swapping with our kinfolks and friends, who needed no bossing but out of their regard and respect for one another did what they were supposed to do. When we would have to hire somebody, as we sometimes did, and he proved unsatisfactory, as he usually did, Nathan would say, “Another damned employee.” And that was the harshest criticism he ever made of the children: “You're acting like a damned employee.”

He quit saying such things after Margaret became an employee of
her school board and Mattie an employee of his company and Caleb an employee of his university, but I know he kept thinking them. He wanted to be free himself, and he wanted his children to be free.

Because of the same desire, I suppose, I sometimes allow myself to wonder if Caleb might not wind up here after all. He is forty-eight years old now. He doesn't know it yet, but it won't be a long time before he is going to begin to think of retirement, of where he will live out the rest of his life, of where he will die. I think he might want to come home then, having been homesick for most of his life. I think he might consider it. But that may be another bucket of smoke, better not thought of. Alice and her wants will have to be considered too, and the changing of the world. And what would he do here as an old man, after such a life, if he came back?

 

Way leads on to way, as the poet says, and what is done is hard to undo. And yet love is not satisfied with such answers but remembers and endures all things and yearns across the distances. As long as the children have been away, I still wonder about them, and I worry.

“I worry,” I said to Andy Catlett, “because I don't know what is going to become of them. At the end, I mean.”

He nodded. He knew what I meant. It used to be that we sort of knew, we could sort of guess, how the lives closest to us would end, what beds our dearest ones were likely to die in, and who would be with them at the last. Now, in this world of employees, of jobs and careers, there is no way even to imagine.

Andy said, “You're worried because they've left the membership,” and he smiled, knowing we both knew whose word that was. “They've gone over from the world of membership to the world of organization. Nathan would say the world of employment.”

And I said, “Yes. That's the trouble I have in mind.”

One of the attractions of moving away into the life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but it is a life too that ends without being remembered. The life of membership with all its cumbers is traded away for the life of employment that makes itself free by forgetting you clean as a whistle when you are not of any more use. When they get to
retirement age, Margaret and Mattie and Caleb will be cast out of place and out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be alone at the last maybe and soon forgotten.

“But the membership,” Andy said, “keeps the memories even of horses and mules and milk cows and dogs.”

 

Caleb, anyhow, was the last of the three ever to live at home. When he was gone the nest, as they say, was empty, and that was something to be sad about. But not entirely. It was lovely after so many years to be living alone with Nathan. We were living right on. We were working hard. And yet, as Nathan said, we were “playing house” too. It was the old happiness of nobody looking, only now nobody was looking almost all the time. We got so we would be very free with looks and touches and kisses and hugs. Anybody young would have laughed at us, but now nobody young was here.

The only people here were just this aging couple, getting a little too small for their skin, their hair turning white, standing it might be in the middle of the kitchen or the garden or the barn lot, hugging each other the way the hungry eat, in a hurry for night to fall. We still had the children to think about and worry about, of course, wherever they were, and our work always ahead of us, and the place always around us with its needs and demands, and yet for a while there I would think that this, this right now, was all the world that I held in my arms. It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it. While we held each other and our old desire came upon us, eternity flew into time like a lighting dove.