Hannah Coulter (11 page)

He said, “It's not the Feltner place,” and he meant it as a question. He was asking if I would marry him, and I trembled.

“I wasn't born on the Feltner place,” I said. “I was born on such a place as this.”

We were looking at each other, though we could barely see. It was almost dark. But to know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light. When a woman and a man give themselves to each other, they have a light between them that nobody but them can see. It doesn't shine outward into time. They see only each other and what is between
them. If it's only an old run-down, overgrown, disregarded farm they have between them, they see that and they see each other, though everything else is dark.

“I know you're afraid,” he said. “And so am I. But can you see a life here?”

I went to him then, and he hugged me. We didn't kiss, not then, not yet. I laid my cheek against him and smelled the smell of his clean shirt and, within it, the smell of him, himself. I put my arms around him then and hugged him as tight as I could. Now that this thing that he had wanted to happen had finally started to happen, maybe he thought I was never going to turn him loose. I wanted to hold and protect and save him forever.

Nathan and I turned away from the war and saw the future shining before us. The future we faced was no more than the old Cuthbert place, but it shone before us. After all that had happened, I was almost surprised to see that I was still a young woman. I was twenty-six. Nathan was twenty-four. We were young and strong and full of desire. When I looked with Nathan at his place, soon to be ours, we saw it as it was and as it might be. We knew what we would ask of it. We were ready for what it would ask of us.

One big problem remained. It was my problem, and I felt helpless to solve it. Our plans had to be told. If we were going to do what we wanted to do, we were going to have to
say
what we wanted. Port William no doubt already had a good idea what we were up to and was waiting to be told, but the people who needed to be told first were Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

I couldn't do it. I knew they probably already guessed, but I couldn't see myself telling them. I couldn't imagine the words. For me to tell them, it seemed like, would be to agree somehow to their loss. It would be as if to say that their loss, from now on, would be only theirs, not mine.

I told Nathan, “I can't. I just can't. I'm sorry. What am I going to do? Run away and write them a letter?”

Nathan said, “You don't have to do anything.”

That same evening after supper he found Mr. Feltner where he knew to look for him—out on the back porch, smoking a cigar.

“Hello, Nathan,” Mr. Feltner said. “Come and sit down.”

Nathan stepped up onto the porch and sat beside him. It was a warm summer evening and clear. The light was going to last a long time. Mrs. Feltner and I were in the kitchen with Little Margaret, finishing up after supper. We were making enough noise, and talking away as we usually did when we worked together. We didn't know Nathan was on the place.

Out on the porch, they made the usual comments about the work and the weather.

And then Nathan said, “Mr. Feltner, Hannah and I have been talking. We want to get married. I want to make it right with you.”

Mr. Feltner looked at the end of his cigar and thought for the proper words. This wasn't a conversation that went very fast. He said, “It's Hannah's choice, Nathan. It's up to her. I will tell you only what you know. She is a daughter to us.”

Then Nathan thought about what he should say, and he said, “I wouldn't ever want her to be any less a daughter to you than she is now, or Little Margaret any less a granddaughter.”

Mr. Feltner thought again with his head down, and then he looked at Nathan. He said, “If she loves you, and you love her, you'll be as welcome to us as you can be.”

Nathan said no more. To change the subject Mr. Feltner said, “Well, I'm going to gain a better neighbor in this. I reckon you'll keep the line fence fixed.” And he laughed. The Cuthbert half of the line fence had been a nuisance to him almost all his life.

“I'll fix the fence,” Nathan said.

Mr. Feltner got up and went to the kitchen door and called in, “Ladies, we've got company. Come on out.”

Nathan stood up as we came out. Mr. Feltner reached for Mrs. Feltner's hand and smiled at her. He said, “Margaret, Hannah and Nathan are going to get married. Nathan has come to ask for our blessing.”

“Oh, bless you!” Mrs. Feltner said, looking at us both, and laughing to keep from crying. “Oh, bless your dear hearts!”

And so our tale was told, no longer a secret from anybody. Some in Port William became more interested than before. Some, now that they knew for certain, turned their attention to things they weren't so sure about.

The next day was Sunday. In the afternoon Nathan came and got me, and we went to look at the old house. Until then I had seen it only from a distance. Though he didn't say so, I knew Nathan was worrying. What was I going to think of it? As usual when there was nothing to say, he didn't say anything.

We turned down the Sand Ripple road, after half a mile or so crossed the creek on a board bridge, and after about the same distance again turned into the lane to the Cuthbert place. We re-crossed the creek and followed the lane as it curved around and up the slope to the house.

The house with its shady yard stood in a swag of the slope, well sheltered from the north wind by the ridge behind it, and not far from the walled spring that once had supplied its water. The yard had not been mowed for at least a year. There was no path to the house. The long blades and dead stems of bluegrass lay in mats and tufts under the weeds and several big stalks of burdock. But a patch of day lilies was in bloom along the fence, and an old small-flowered pink rambler rose was blooming in a heap by the gate where we got out of the car.

Nathan unwired the gate. We picked our way across the yard, went up onto the back porch, pushed open the door that maybe never had been locked, and went into the kitchen. The air was musty and hot. The house was full of the stale smell of people long gone and the most complete silence. Going into it was a little like going back to the house of a lonely old widow after her funeral. We felt like we ought to be quiet, and we went quietly into every room. We looked at everything and spoke of what we saw in low voices, as if afraid of being overheard.

It was a house like a lot of houses around Port William: four rooms downstairs, two upstairs, the front rooms downstairs and the rooms above divided by narrow hallways, the rear slant of the roof much longer than the front, the roof in front divided by a gable, a narrow strip of porch along the back, a wider one in front.

In structure the house was tight and sound. It was straight, square, level, and plumb. The rock foundation was solid. The roof would last another ten years. But the marks of hard use and neglect were everywhere.
A few useless old sticks of furniture were lying about. The wallpaper sagged or hung in shreds where the winter thaws had sweated it loose. A window was broken. Tribes of wasps and mud daubers had come in to keep house. A pair of wrens were nesting in a gallon bucket on the mantelpiece in the living room. Everything was covered with dirt and dust. There was a dead chimney swift on the kitchen floor. The electric line had come down the creek a few years before, and the house was wired. There was no plumbing. For heat there were fireplaces in the front rooms and stovepipe holes in the chimneys. I would be starting out here at about where I had left off at Grandmam's. Except that here we would have electricity. And this was a better house.

We went into every room and out onto the front porch that had a fine outlook over the narrow little valley of Sand Ripple, and then back through the house and out again onto the back porch. We stood and looked at the old cellar at the end of the porch, the well, the smokehouse and henhouse, the privy leaning like the tower of Pisa out by the garden fence, the two old barns, the corncrib, the buggy shed.

So far, we had spoken only of what we saw. But now Nathan said, “Well, it's fixable, don't you think so?”

I said, “Of course it is. It's a good house. It's our house.”

He said, “Here's what I've thought. We'll make it right. We can take all the time we need. We'll go ahead and make at least the downstairs just the way you want it, and then we can get married.”

It didn't take me anything like a minute to think about that. I said, “No. Let's go ahead. Let's don't wait.”

That was what we did, and I never was the least bit sorry. Nathan was glad too. We didn't care what we would have to put up with, as long as we could be together. “We'll camp in it while we work on it,” I said. “We'll tell Little Margaret we're camping out. She'll love that.”

We tore and scraped away the loose wallpaper, got rid of the junk and the broken glass, swept and mopped and swept and mopped again. Nathan reglazed the broken sash, and I washed all the windows. We went to Hargrave and bought a new cooking stove and a refrigerator, and that was about the end of our buying for that year. The rest of the household stuff we needed we got out of attics or storerooms at Burley's and Jarrat's
and the Feltners'. We furnished three downstairs rooms with what we needed to cook, eat, wash, sleep, and sit down. And then we got married and moved in.

Those were fine days. Everything we did seemed to start something that was going to go on and on. I'll never forget the feeling it gave me just to make this house clean, to fill it with fresh air and the good smell of soapy water, to wash the dingy windows and see the rooms fill with light, to get here one morning and find that Nathan had mowed the yard, sparing the day lilies and the rambler rose. I cut a few blossoms and stuck them in a jar of water in the living room.

From the first day we had all the help we needed, and sometimes more. Whenever the Coulter brothers or the Feltners could spare a little time, some of them or all of them would be over here at our place, doing something that needed to be done. Nathan mended two stalls in the feed barn and brought over a team of mules and a mowing machine. The island of mowed land in the yard soon spread to include the garden, the barn lot, a strip along the lane down to the woods on the creek bluff, and a scrap of pasture behind the barn. Nathan and Burley mended fence for a day or so, and then when they were idle the mules were turned out to graze in the pasture. Before long, a Jersey cow was grazing with them, and her good milk and cream and butter were the first of our own produce that we put on our table. And then Nathan caught a dozen of Burley's half-wild mongrel hens, and we began eating the eggs that Little Margaret and I gathered in our own henhouse.

When we had got ourselves moved in with our hodgepodge of furniture, the house looked bare and spare and incomplete enough. We had no rugs, no window shades or curtains, and the walls were just splotches of bare plaster and old wallpaper. I didn't mind. I had never had a house of my own before, and I was happy. Mrs. Feltner accepted it all in a good spirit, she was even amused by it, but she wasn't as reconciled as I was.

One day she said, “Honey, you have got to have some curtains.”

And so she appointed herself and measured the windows and made curtains.

She was right. The curtains civilized the place and gave it a touch of warmth and care that pleased us all.

It was during that time of beginning that I learned really to know Jarrat Coulter, my new father-in-law. It had been no trouble to know Burley, that wondrous, wayward, loyal, funny, grave, thoughtful, tender, solitary, companionable man. Burley had spent a lot of his life alone, fishing, hunting, rambling about in the woods. And he had lived alone after his parents were dead and the boys gone. But he loved company too, and he loved talk. You could get to know Burley in about thirty minutes. Well, maybe that is not quite right. It would be better to say that after you had known him for thirty minutes, you wouldn't be surprised by anything more that you learned about him.