Hannah Coulter (22 page)

Your life, as you have lived it, is way back yonder in time. But you are still living, and your living life, expectations subtracted, has a shape, and the shape of it includes the past. The absent and the dead are in it. And the living are in it. As Nathan and I got old and our place called out more and more for younger people, the living who meant the most to us were Danny and Lyda Branch and their children. They had always been part
of our membership, we had loved them always, but there came a time when they were necessary to us. We couldn't have got along without them. They have been a godsend.

 

Danny, as you might say, came into the membership unannounced. Burley was thirty-seven years old when Danny was born. He was surprised, but was well past the time when he might have been greatly astonished that a thing so natural as his long love for Kate Helen Branch should have had a natural result. Before then he had not been a man much excited about results.

And so when Danny made his appearance, the world continued in its daily course without being overly impressed, and so did Burley. Burley knew that certain duties had arrived with his baby son, and he felt the seed of fatherly pride and love sprouting in his heart, but he went on mainly as he had before. He regarded Danny simply as a matter of fact, and without marrying his son's mother, or making any other noticeable change, he simply afforded as much room in his life to Danny as Danny was able to occupy.

The others were not more aware than they had to be that Burley even had a son until Danny appeared in person. He just more or less showed up, following Burley through the woods and fields, Nathan said, like a toy dog on a string, with the smile he was going to be known for already on his face. It was a smile that was going to serve for many words. His eyes were black, as bright as buttons, forever trying to see everything, and not missing much. He would follow Burley for hours, hunting or rambling in the woods, Burley saying almost nothing, Danny nothing at all. Danny grew up with the knowledge of the old economy of the natural world that, for nothing and for pleasure, yielded in its seasons game and fish and nuts and berries and herbs and marketable pelts. “He knows more about all that than he knows he knows,” Nathan said, who knew a good deal about it himself and from the same source.

But Danny was a more domestic man than Burley. Burley had had to learn to be domestic, had learned slowly, and had never completely learned. Danny, besides learning early a lot about domestic economy from his mother's housekeeping during the Depression, seemed to have a gift for it. Or you might say that Danny just included the wild world in
his domesticity without worrying about the difference. He gathered the woods and the waters into his homelife as a robin gathers mud and straw into her nest. Anyhow, from boyhood he was good at farming and he loved farming, like my Caleb. In his wide-eyed, quiet way he put himself to school to his uncle Jarrat, to Mr. Feltner, to Nathan, to Elton Penn, and to every other good farmer he worked with or could listen to.

That was the education that mattered to him. He stayed in school, because he had to, until he was sixteen. The day he was sixteen, because he no longer had to go, he quit. “What I got out of school,” he used to say, “was Lyda.”

“And for that,” Lyda would answer, “you had better thank the Lord!”

She was right, for she exactly suited him, she was what he needed, and she knew it. She knew too, though she acknowledged it less often and more quietly, that he suited her.

Danny quit school in 1948, the year Nathan and I married. In 1950, after his mother died, Danny married Lyda, when they were still just kids, Danny eighteen and Lyda seventeen, and they moved into the old house with Burley.

I am not sure why, maybe they were just being sensible because they were young and poor, but they didn't have any children for seven years. And then about as fast as it could have been done, they had seven children: Will, Royal, Coulter, Fount, Reuben, Rachel, and Rosie. There were just ten years between Will and Rosie.

Burley took immense pleasure in all this family-making, and he willingly did his share of the work and the watching over. He could be stern enough with the children when he needed to be—“for the sake of survival,” Lyda said—but, by preference, he was their playmate or their toy. I have seen them crawling on him like so many pet coons, playing with his hat or his hair, going through his pockets, unfastening his buttons, looking into his ears and nose, feeling his whiskers and his wrinkles.

One day, in the midst of a tumult egged on by Burley, Lyda looked at me and laughed. She said, “Can pleasure have led to
this?
”

And Burley said, “Well, let 'em have a little pleasure of their own.”

His pleasure in the children owed a lot, I think, to Lyda and Danny's good sense. The children were allowed to be as rowdy as they pleased as long as they were outdoors. And outdoors they had pretty much the run
of the place, along with a regular zoo of cats and dogs, orphan calves and lambs, pet coons and squirrels and groundhogs. They followed the grownups around at work. They played with Danny's tools and whatever was cast off and lying around: old wheels or tires or inner tubes or rope or string or pieces of chain. When they went into the house they were expected to quiet down, “for the sake of survival,” and they did. And that didn't mean that they sat in front of the television, either. It meant that they read or played quietly or went to sleep. The older ones helped with the younger ones. They played at work until they were old enough to work, and then they worked. This is what Lyda and Danny expected of them, and this seems to have been what they expected of themselves.

 

When I think back to the childhood of my own children now, I remember that the thought of their education was always uppermost. Nathan and I, and I more than Nathan, wanted them to go to school. We wanted them to have all the education they needed or wanted, and yet hovering over that thought always was the possibility that once they were educated they would go away, which, as it turned out, they did. We owed them that choice, and we gave it to them, and it might be hard to argue that we were wrong. But I wonder now, and I wonder it many a time, if the other choice, the choice of coming home, might not have been made clearer.

Danny and Lyda's attitude toward education was different from Nathan's and mine. I can see it clearly now. Their attitude maybe had nothing at all to do with the future. The school was there, and so the children went to it. For a while after the oldest ones started, the school was in Port William, and they went there. And then the Port William school was closed, and the children rode down to Hargrave and back every day on the bus. Danny and Lyda seemed not to mind. They just accepted it as it came. They wanted the children to study and learn and behave themselves reasonably well, but I don't think they felt any pressure from the future. I don't think they had the idea that they owed it to the children to send them to college.

When the children got old enough to quit school, if they wanted to quit, they were allowed to do as their father had done. Of the seven, only
Fount, who was the most bookish of the boys, and Rosie finished high school. Every one of them seemed to have a perfect faith in the education they got outside of school, which they didn't even call “education.” Out of school, they learned what they evidently thought they needed most to know: to keep house, to raise a garden or a crop, to care for livestock, to break a mule or shoe one, to fix a motor and almost anything else, to hunt, fish, trap, preserve a hide, hive a swarm, cook or preserve anything edible, and to take pleasure in such things. To learn things they didn't know, they asked somebody or they read books. They were a lot like their friends among the Amish.

Compared to nearly everybody else, the Branches have led a sort of futureless life. They have planned and provided as much as they needed to, but they take little thought for the morrow. They aren't going any place, they aren't getting ready to become anything but what they are, and so their lives are not fretful and hankering. And they are all still here, still farming. They are here, and if the world lasts they are going to be here for quite a while. If I had “venture capital” to invest, I think I would invest it in the Branches.

They farm here and on the Feltner place and on the Jarrat Coulter place and on Danny and Lyda's place, which is the Coulter home place, and on another place or two. Royal and Coulter have farms of their own, and so do Rosie and her husband. They survive and go on because they like where they are and what they are doing, they aren't trying to get up in the world, and they produce more than they consume. Except for a manure spreader that Danny bought not long ago from a little Amish factory up in Ohio, I don't think any of them has ever bought a new piece of equipment. A junk yard is a gold mine to them. If horses or mules will work cheaper than a tractor, then they work horses or mules. They use their cisterns and wells, even if the city water line goes right through their front yards. They catch or shoot or find or grow nearly everything they eat. When they need to, they do a little custom work on the side, they trade and contrive and make do, getting by and prospering both at once. It doesn't seem to bother them that while they are making crops and meat and timber, other people are making only money that they sometimes don't even work for.

Lyda and I have loved each other for a long time, from the time when she looked up to me as an older woman and teacher to the time when I look up to her as my main prop, my help and comfort. We have done so much sewing together, curtains and clothes and slipcovers and such, that she says we have sewed ourselves together. We have cooked and canned and butchered together and helped our men together.

The number of Lyda's children and children-in-law and grandchildren has grown past her ability to remember birthdays, and she has to keep a list, but she remembers everything else. She knows the history and the goodnesses and the weaknesses of every one of them, and she knows exactly what to get every one of them on their birthdays and at Christmas.

I am in need of presents to give on those days too, of course, but I am a lot less certain of what to get. I usually know pretty well what to get for Margaret, and for a while I knew to a certainty what to get for Virgie. Now I don't know where he is, let alone what he wants or needs. I can guess or suppose with some confidence about Caleb and Alice, but only after I've found something that looks more or less appropriate. About Mattie and his family, who are strangers to me even when they are here, I never have a glimmer. It is tempting to solve that problem by sending money, but I know what that would be. It would be abandonment. And so I always send them
something.

I need Lyda for that. She is the best present buyer that ever was. Two or three times a year we make a big shopping trip to Louisville. We always take my car, and Lyda drives.

“If you drive, we have got to go in my car,” I say. “That makes it fair.”

“And a lot more likely that we'll get home,” Lyda says, for their vehicles tend to quit regularly at odd times.

We take our lists, and we shop in the malls and talk a lot and eat something unusual and have a splendid time. When I get stumped, Lyda will take on my problem. Sooner or later she will point or hold something up and say, “How about this?” And nine times out of ten it will be just the thing.

Danny gave the same watchful friendliness to Nathan. Heaven will have to pay our debt to them. They have made me glad I have stayed alive, as Burley Coulter used to say.

Even old, your husband is the young man you remember now. Even dead, he is the man you remember, not as he was but as he is, alive still in your love. Death is a sort of lens, though I used to think of it as a wall or a shut door. It changes things and makes them clear. Maybe it is the truest way of knowing this dream, this brief and timeless life. Sometimes when I try to remember Nathan, I can't see him exactly enough. Other times, when I haven't thought of him, he comes to me unbidden, and I see him more clearly, I think, than ever I did. Am I awake then, or there, or here?

It is the fall of the year. We have had Thanksgiving. Caleb and Alice were here. And Margaret came, reconciled by now maybe to Virgie's absence, but not one of us spoke of Virgie. I fixed a big dinner, enough to keep us all in leftovers for a while: a young gobbler that Coulter Branch shot and gave to me, dressing and gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn pudding, hot rolls, a cushaw pie. We sat down to it, the four of us, like stray pieces of several puzzles. Nathan would have asked the blessing, and I should have, I tried to, but that turned out to be a silence I could not speak in. I only sat with my head down, while the others waited for me to say something out loud. And then, to change the subject, I said, “Caleb, take a roll and pass 'em.”

Soon now it will be Christmas of the two thousandth year of Christ.
Lyda and I have done our shopping. I have wrapped and sent off my gifts to the absent ones, and have nearly finished with the others. I have wrapped Virgie's present and laid it by, in case he reappears. Up in the boys' old room, where the morning light is strong and I do my sewing, I am making new kitchen curtains for Lyda.

I find plenty to do. I keep house and cook. In fit weather I take my walks. For company I go to church or drive over to Lyda and Danny's, or I go and visit an hour or two at Andy and Flora Catlett's to see what is in their minds. Sometimes they drive over here and sit till bedtime. Sometimes, a haunted old woman, I wander about in this house that Nathan and I renewed, that is now aged and worn by our life in it. How many steps, wearing the thresholds? I look at it all again. Sometimes it fills to the brim with sorrow, which signifies the joy that has been here, and the love. It is entirely a gift. There is a silence here now that is the absence of many voices. In that silence I can no longer bear the television or the radio. Margaret and Lyda insist that I keep the telephone, but I hate to hear it ring. I read books, whose voices don't disturb the silence. Sometimes I sit still in my chair late into the night, telling over this story to myself.