Hannah Coulter (6 page)

He was watching me, still grinning, but he was thinking too. He was serious. “One advantage would be the old well. It's still a good one, I think. They say it was never dry.”

He went to the well and lifted away the rocks and boards that covered the opening.

“Come look.”

We lay on our stomachs and looked in, blind at first after the sunlight, and then gradually seeing. The well wasn't wide, but it went a long way down. A stone wall went to the bedrock, beautiful as that old work almost always is, and below that the well opened through layer after layer of time to a flat disk of light where we saw our two faces looking back up at us right out of the innards of the world.

 

As it turned out, that was the last time we ever spoke of building a house there between the two original hearths. War was coming.

We got married in the fall of 1941, after the crops were harvested. We gave our promise of faithfulness until death in a preacher's living room in Hargrave. Bess and Wheeler Catlett stood up with us. There were just the four of us and the preacher and his wife. We made a little wedding trip by train to Chicago, where neither of us had ever been. We felt rather small amidst the noise and gladder than we admitted to be going home when the time came.

Our home—for the time being, as we said—was Virgil's old room at the Feltners'. We had agreed with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, almost as soon as we had spoken of marriage, that we would live with them until we could build for ourselves. They made us welcome. We weren't crowded, goodness knows. Ten rooms were more than plenty for Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, Virgil and me, and Mrs. Feltner's younger brother, Ernest Finley, who slept in the room over the kitchen, as I had done at home. But once there, we thought no further about building a house. War and rumors of
war made a kind of pressure against the future or any talk of plans. And then, after Pearl Harbor, our voices sounded different to us, as voices do in a house after an outside door has blown open.

It was the Christmas season, and we made the most of it. Virgil and I cut a cedar tree that filled a corner of the parlor, reached to the ceiling, and gave its fragrance to the whole room. We hung its branches with ornaments and lights, and wrapped our presents and put them underneath. One evening Virgil called up the Catlett children, pretending to be Santa Claus, and wound them up so that Bess and Wheeler nearly never got them to bed. We cooked for a week—Nettie Banion, the Feltners' cook, and Mrs. Feltner and I. We made cookies and candy, some for ourselves, some to give away. We made a fruit cake, a pecan cake, and a jam cake. Mr. Feltner went to the smokehouse and brought in an old ham, which we boiled and then baked. We made criss-crosses in the fat on top, finished it off with a glaze, and then put one clove exactly in the center of each square. We talked no end, of course, and joked and laughed. And I couldn't help going often to the pantry to look at what we had done and admire it, for these Christmas doings ran far ahead of any I had known before.

Each of us knew that the others were dealing nearly all the time with the thought of the war, but that thought we kept in the secret quiet of our own minds. Maybe we were thinking too of the sky opening over the shepherds who were abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks, and the light of Heaven falling over them, and the angel announcing peace. I was thinking of that, and also of the sufferers in the Bethlehem stable, as I never had before. There was an ache that from time to time seemed to fall entirely through me like a misting rain. The war was a bodily presence. It was in all of us, and nobody said a word.

Virgil and I brought Grandmam over from Shagbark on Christmas Eve. She was wearing her Sunday black and her silver earrings and broach. To keep from embarrassing me, as I understood, she had bought a nice winter coat and a little suitcase. She had presents for the Feltners and for Virgil and me in a shopping bag that she refused to let Virgil carry. I had worried that she would feel out of place at the Feltners, but I need not have. Mr. and Mrs. Feltner were at the door to welcome her, and she thanked them with honest pleasure and with grace.

On Christmas morning Nettie Banion's mother-in-law, Aunt Fanny, came up to the house with Nettie to resume for the day her old command of the kitchen. Joe Banion soon followed them under Aunt Fanny's orders to be on hand if needed.

And then the others came. Bess and Wheeler were first. Their boys flew through the front door, leaving it open, waving two new pearl-handled cap pistols apiece, followed by their little sisters with their Christmas dolls, followed by Bess and Wheeler with their arms full of wrapped presents. We all gathered around, smiling and talking and hugging and laughing. The boys were noisy as a crowd until Virgil said, “Now, Andy and Henry, you remember our rule—I get half of what you get, and you get half of what I get.” And then they got noisier, Henry offering Virgil one of his pistols, Andy backing up to keep both of his. And then all three of them went to the kitchen to smell the cooking and show their pistols to Nettie and Aunt Fanny.

Hearing the commotion, Ernest Finley came down from his room. Ernest had been wounded in the First World War and walked on crutches. He was a woodworker and a carpenter, a thoughtful, quiet-speaking man who usually worked alone. The Catlett boys loved him because of his work and his tools and his neat shop and the long bedtime stories he told them when they came to visit.

Miss Ora came, still alert to see that I called her “Auntie,” with Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Homer Lord, who had come down to Hargrave the day before from Indianapolis. The Lords weren't kin to the Feltners at all, except that Aunt Lizzie and Mrs. Feltner had been best friends when they were girls—which, Aunt Lizzie said, was as close kin as you could get.

And then Virgil and I and the boys with their pistols drove out the Bird's Branch road to Uncle Jack Beechum's place—where he had been “batching it,” as he said, since the death of his wife—and brought him to our house. He was the much younger brother of Mr. Feltner's mother, Nancy Beechum Feltner. Mr. Feltner's father, Ben, had been a father and a friend to Uncle Jack, who now was in a way the head of the family, though he never claimed such authority. Everybody looked up to him and loved him and, as sometimes was necessary, put up with him.

Uncle Jack didn't
try
to have dignity, he just had it. A man of great strength in his day, he walked now with a cane, bent a little at the hips
but still straight-backed. He was a big man, work-brittle, and there was no foolishness about him.

You would have thought Henry would not have dared to do it, but as we were going from the car to the house he ran in front of Uncle Jack and shot at him with his pistols. I didn't think Uncle Jack would see anything funny in that, but he did. He gave a great snort of delight. He said, “
That
boy'll put the cat in the churn.”

And so we all were there.

To get the children calmed down before dinner and so the little girls could have a nap afterwards, we opened the presents right away. The old parlor was crowded with the tree and the people and the presents and the pretty wrapping papers flying about. Nettie Banion and Joe and Aunt Fanny sat in the doorway, waiting to receive the presents everybody had brought for them. The boys sat beside Virgil, who was making a big to-do over their presents, in which he was still claiming half-interest. The boys were a little unsure about this, but they loved his carrying on, and they sat as close to him as they could get.

There were sixteen of us around the long table in the dining room. The table was so beautiful when we came in that it seemed almost a shame not to just stand and look at it. Mrs. Feltner had put on her best tablecloth and her good dishes and silverware that she never used except for company. And on the table at last, after our long preparations, were our ham, our turkey and dressing, and our scalloped oysters under their brown crust. There was a cut glass bowl of cranberry sauce. There were mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and butter beans, corn pudding, and hot rolls. On the sideboard were our lovely cakes on cake stands and a big pitcher of custard that would be served with whipped cream.

It looked too good to touch, let alone eat, and yet of course we ate. Grandmam sat at Mr. Feltner's right hand at his end of the table, and Uncle Jack sat at Mrs. Feltner's right hand at her end. Virgil and I sat opposite Bess and Wheeler at the center. And the children in their chairs and high chairs were portioned out among the grownups, no two together.

Every meal at the Feltners was good, for Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion both were fine cooks, but this one was extra good, and there were many compliments. Of all the compliments Uncle Jack's were the best,
though he only increased the compliments of other people. He ate with great hunger and relish, and it was a joy to watch him. When somebody would say, “That is a wonderful ham” or “This dressing is perfect,” Uncle Jack would solemnly shake his head and say, “Ay Lord, it is that!” And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

Beyond that, he said little, and Grandmam too had little to say, but whatever they said was gracious. To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

 

We were at the table a long time, and while we ate in the dining room, Nettie and Joe and Aunt Fanny ate in the kitchen. When the cakes and custard had been offered again, and everybody had said, “No, no more for me” or “I can't eat another bite” or “I'm already foundered,” we were done at last. The men went back to the living room, the boys went to play outdoors, and Bess took the little girls to the quietest bedroom for their naps, while the rest of us women began to clear the table and wash the dishes and set things back to rights. For me, this was maybe the best part of all. We had the quiet then of women working together, making order again after the commotion and hurry of the meal. I have always loved the easy conversation of such times. That day everybody had something to remember, something that others also remembered, about other Christmases and about that day so far, and they told it to enjoy it again and to enjoy it together. When the dishes were all scraped up and stacked, Auntie and Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Fanny and Grandmam sat talking at the kitchen table while Mrs. Feltner and Nettie and I finished up.

When everything was put away and neat again, and all the commotion of the meal seemed a low sound dying away behind us, and Nettie and Aunt Fanny had started home with their presents, we went in and sat with the men in the living room. The talk was easy and quiet there too. Mainly the older ones, out of courtesy to Grandmam, were asking about people they knew in common and testing their memories against one another.

The day wound down. The Catlett girls woke up from their naps. The boys came in chilly from their play and sat in laps until they warmed up again, and then they wandered off. The talk began to have the sound it
does when it is coming to an end. Finally Wheeler stood up and said to Bess, “I expect we'd better go.” Everybody got up then and began saying good-bye, collecting presents, getting their hats and coats.

Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

And so I became one of the Feltners, and not in name only. I had my place and my work among them. They let me belong to them and to their place, and I needed to belong somewhere. I belonged to Grandmam as I always will, but I didn't any longer belong in her place. Everybody understood that. When Virgil was called to the army in 1942, as we had feared and expected, there was no question but that I would stay on with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

I could tell of my sorrow when Virgil went away, but it was not, strictly speaking,
my
sorrow. It was the sorrow of the family, of Port William, of the whole country. A great sorrow and a great fear had come into all the world, and the world was changing. I grew up, it seems to me, in the small old local world of places like Shagbark and Hargrave and Port William in their daily work and dreaming of themselves. I married Virgil in that world, which was his world too though he had been to college. It was the world of our vision of a new house between the old chimneys. It was the world of the Feltners' Christmas dinner in 1941. But then, against the fires and smokes of the war, the new war of the whole world, that old world looked small and lost. We were in the new
world made by the new war, into which Virgil and our possible life together had gone away, for a time as I hoped but in fact forever. Our minds were driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss, absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.

I stayed on in a life that would have been mine and Virgil's but now was only mine. I lived the daily life of Port William that he no longer lived but only read about in our letters.

We all wrote to him, even the Catlett boys. Andy wrote, “Dear Uncle Virgil, I'm restless as a racehorse waiting for you to come home.” Like many a young wife of that time, I wrote every day, maybe not a whole letter every day, but at least a part of one, a sort of daily news report from “the home front.” As I increased my knowledge of Port William, I had more to write.

The Coulter brothers, Jarrat and Burley, started cropping on the Feltner place during the war, and so I got to know them. I got to know Dorie and Marce Catlett, Wheeler's parents; and Jayber Crow, the barber; and Athey and Della Keith, who had a good farm down in the river bottom and whose daughter, Mattie, was a little younger than I was; and Martin Rowanberry, known as “Mart,” who swapped work with the Coulters and hunted with Burley. Jarrat Coulter's two sons, Tom and Nathan, were in the army too, and so was Arthur Rowanberry, “Art,” who was Mart's older brother. And so when I wrote to Virgil, I didn't want for something to tell.