Hannah Coulter (15 page)

He said, “I've just got to rest a minute. I gave out up there.”

He was drenched with sweat, poor old boy, and he had to be tired. But it was the wrong time to quit. Though Nathan was up in the barn where I couldn't see his face, I could hear his silence. I wasn't looking forward to what he was going to say.

But Burley blew a drop of sweat off the end of his nose and gave Mattie a big smile. He said, “You didn't give out. You gave up.”

Burley had been handing the tobacco off the wagon. He was about seventy then, was soaked with sweat himself and as tired as the rest of us, but he was smiling. He said, “You might ought to get better acquainted with Old Willie.” Old Willie was Burley's name for willpower.

Mattie got up then and climbed back to his place. As time would tell, he was not one for such work, was no kind of farmer, but he never pulled
that
trick again.

Caleb did like to farm and liked to work and was full of enthusiasm. Burley's corrections to him were usually of the opposite kind: “Whoa! Whoa! Slow down there, Lightning! Let your mind catch up with your feet. We ain't got time to quit work and go to a funeral.”

Burley could tease them into sense and into work. He could tease them out of sullenness or anger or danger or the dumps. He would make terrible threats against them—“You boys, if you don't stop that, I'm going to climb up on top of you and walk around” or “Boys, I'm about to go to work on you all with a two-handed piss-ellum club”—and they would giggle and do what he told them. It was a kind of wonder. They had no fear of him, they knew better than to take him seriously, and yet they would mind him.

Burley made more or less a secret of being a fiddler, but the family knew it, and a few others. In his younger years he would occasionally take his fiddle to a dance or to someplace where music was being played, as now and again late at night in Jayber Crow's barbershop.

He and Kate Helen, Danny's mother, used to play and sing together. This they handed on to Danny, who could play and sing, and Danny married Lyda, who could sing, and they handed it on to their children. If any of the family were making music, Burley would likely be with them, if he happened to be at the house. He was not always at the house.

As he got old, Burley would sometimes sit up in his room alone and play. Lyda would hear him up there and would tell me about it. He sometimes played fiddle tunes that had belonged to the place in the old times, that maybe he was the last to know, sometimes he played once-popular country songs, and sometimes, though he was not a churchly man, he played hymns. Playing alone, he played slowly. He couldn't finger as nimbly as he used to, but he played slowly, it seemed, just to dwell on the notes. It wasn't the music you would expect, Lyda said, but it was music.

Maybe because of the stiffness of his fingers, he had grown shyer about his playing, but still there would be times when we would go over to sit till bedtime and he would bring his fiddle down and play if the others were playing. His favorite song, I think, was “Wildwood Flower,” and sometimes he would ask Lyda to sing it with him. He had sung it once, as a lover, with Kate Helen. Now he sang it with his might-as-well-be daughter, and with the tenderness of his love for her.

One night—this was not long after Mr. Feltner died—toward the end of the evening, he started all alone into “Abide with Me.” He played it once, and then looked at Lyda, asking her to sing, and as he started the tune again, she sang. She sang it all the way through, and all of us understood. This was his mourning and his benediction, not just for his friend Mat Feltner, but for Grandpa and Grandma Coulter, Kate Helen, Jarrat, Tom, Uncle Jack, for the membership of his life and ours, its long suffering, past and to come:

All of us were crying by the time they finished. Lyda ceased, and Burley played it through again, a final time, slowly, leaning forward as if the better to pour the music out of the f-holes. He laid the fiddle across his lap, wiped his tears on the back of his hand, looked at us and smiled, and then he laughed his laugh of pleasure at what they had done.

I have not been back to our old place, Grandmam's place, at Shagbark since my father died. It is dear to me, or the memory of it is, but for a long time I feared the sight of what had become of it.

After Elvin and Allen were gone and my father was dead, Ivy lived on alone in the old house for a while. But the house was getting ready to tumble down on top of Ivy, who by then was living in the kitchen, and there was no longer any reason for the family to “hang on to it,” as they said. And so the place was bought as “an investment” by some people in Cincinnati, who promptly solved the problem of the old house by burning it down and replacing it with a mobile home.

This was no proper concern of mine, since Ivy, as Grandmam had foreseen, was my father's only heir. From her his inheritance, if anything was left of it, was to pass to Elvin and Allen. But without trying to know, I knew everything that happened, for of course there are always people who volunteer to keep you informed.

With her share of the proceeds from the sale of the place and her checks from Social Security, Ivy made her last stand in a used mobile home of her own on the site of another burnt house next to the store, now shut, at Shagbark.

I would tell myself that Ivy's fate was not my concern. But of course
it was, for I had never ceased to think of her. The hardest resentments to give up are the ones you felt knowingly as a child, and I had kept a list of resentments against Ivy. I never reconciled myself to her marriage to my father, which I continued to think had damaged him and insulted my mother. And I remembered every one of her injustices to me. I had hated her for her power over us, and at times I had been afraid of her. I had enough imagination to know what a life I would have lived if it had not been for Grandmam.

After Grandmam died, I imagined that my father would give me her silver broach and earrings. I used too much imagination that time, for he did not give them to me, and I knew perfectly that Ivy had taken them for herself.

I don't want you to think, Andy Catlett, that I dwelt on the subject of Ivy. I didn't. I had a plenty else to think about. I was a grown woman with a husband and children and a place of my own. I had a good life, and I knew it. But I was not forgetting Ivy, either. From time to time, too often maybe, I thought of her, and when I thought of her I thought of the broach and earrings that she did not deserve and was unworthy to wear. That thought, when I had it on my mind, was like a grain of corn in my shoe.

And then one afternoon, when the thought of Ivy was miles away, I met her.

I had gone into the dry goods store at Hargrave, the old Klinger's Dry Goods that by now stands as empty as the store at Shagbark, to look for dress material. Mrs. Klinger was showing me what they had while I looked and felt and mused. And then I was aware that an old woman whose head hardly came to my shoulder was standing beside me.

She was wearing a head scarf and a dress that hung on her as it would have hung on a chair. She was shrunken and twisted by arthritis and was leaning on two canes. Her hands were so knotted as hardly to look like hands. She was smiling at me. She said, “You don't know me, do you?”

I knew her then, and almost instantly there were tears on my face. I started feeling in my purse for a handkerchief and tried to be able to say something. All kinds of knowledge came to me, all in a sort of flare in my mind. I knew for one thing that she was more simpleminded than I had ever thought. She had perfectly forgot, or had never known, how
much and how justly I had resented her. But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor sufferer who stood there with me?

“Yes, Ivy, I know you,” I said, and I sounded kind.

I didn't understand exactly what had happened until the thought of her woke me up in the middle of that night, and I was saying to myself, “You have
forgiven
her.”

I had. My old hatred and contempt and fear, that I had kept so carefully so long, were gone, and I was free.

I was twenty-six years getting from my birth in the old house on the Steadman place at Shagbark to a house and place of my own, and to a long-going, day-to-day marriage. As I said before, the marriage had troubles in it, which is easy to say. It had something else in it too, which is not so easy. As I go about quietly by myself in my days now or lie awake in the night, I hunt for the way to speak of it, for it is the best thing I have known in this world, and it lays its peace on everything else I know.

What the marriage had in it, of course, was Nathan and me. We were in it together because of our plighting of troth, his to me, mine to him, and that was one thing. But we were together in it also because, from time to time, often enough, we were in it by desire, we met entirely in it and were one flesh. What that was and is and means is not altogether going to be found in words.

 

This was a marriage that did not begin with a honeymoon, and that tells one of the important things about it. We got married and went to work. We had to, we didn't have time or money to spare. And a honeymoon was something we never greatly missed. Nathan said, “It would have been nice if we'd had it, but we didn't have it.” We had our living to make, and our place to make while we made our living. We were at
work pretty quick after the groom kissed the bride. We had debts to pay and a long effort ahead of us.

The making of the place was the thing that ruled over everything else, for we were living from the place. Little Margaret, and our boys after they came, were living from the place. You can see that it is hard to mark the difference between our life and our place, our place and ourselves.

As the years passed and our life changed, the place changed. It emerged, you might say, from what it had been into what we needed and wanted it to be, never perfect of course, but always a little better. It came under the influence of what we foresaw in it, and of our ways of using it and going about in it.

Though we talked of what was possible and what needed to be done, the shaping of the place, the look of it, was mostly Nathan's doing. He had a way of getting it right.

He didn't want to come out and say so, but he was proud of his work.

When Andy Catlett would come back after one of his longish absences from home and would come to see us, Nathan would ask him, “Well, do you see anything different?”

It would be a new building or an old one renewed or a new fence, or a coat of paint somewhere. Andy would shake his head and grin, knowing he was being tested and was failing the test. Nathan would have to tell him, “Look at the barn” or “Look at the lot fence” or “Look at the corncrib.”

Andy would say, “Oh!” and make the proper compliment, for he would be honestly pleased as soon as he saw what he needed to see.

Later Nathan would laugh. “He's the same damned dreamy kid he's always been.”

But this wasn't exactly Andy's fault. What Nathan had done was what should have been done. The place never looked as if something had been changed. It looked right. It looked the way it ought to have looked. It looked right because the right man was doing the work. If the wrong man had done it, Andy, even you would have noticed.

 

Nathan always got up before I did. If it was winter he would build the fires. As the children grew big enough to have their own morning chores, he would get them up. I would hear them go out. The nighttime quiet
would fill the house again. And then I would get up and dress and go to the kitchen. I would have breakfast ready by the time they came in with the milk.

Except when I was needed in the crew work of the busiest farming seasons, I kept the house, worked in the garden, and took care of the chickens, doing the work again that I had done with Grandmam when I was a girl, except that now I usually didn't do the milking. As I went about my work then as a young woman, and still now when I am old, Grandmam has been often close to me in my thoughts. And again I come to the difficulty of finding words. It is hard to say what it means to be at work and thinking of a person you loved and love still who did that same work before you and who taught you to do it. It is a comfort ever and always, like hearing the rhyme come when you are singing a song.

The house, its furnishings and surroundings, took on the appearance given it by my ways of work and my liking, just as Nathan's work and his liking altered the looks of the farm. And as our work shaped our workplaces, our work and our workplaces shaped our days. Our work brought us together and drew us apart. Sometimes we would be together only at mealtimes and at night. Sometimes we would be together at the same work most of the day.