Hannah Coulter (7 page)

I was making myself at home. In the dark way of the world I had come to what would be my life's place, though I could not yet know the life I would live in it. Jarrat Coulter would become my second father-in-law, and Burley would then be my uncle, though I would not so much as lay eyes on Nathan for more than three years. I had come unknowing into what Burley would have called the “membership” of my life. I was becoming a member of Port William.

Port William in fact and mystery, in the light and in the dark—even the name is a stumper. Why in the world would you build a town on top of a hill, or anyhow a ridge, half a mile from the river, and call it a port?

Anybody who lives in Port William is apt to hear that question enough to get used to it. Ben Feltner, Virgil's grandfather, always gave
the same answer: “They didn't know where the river was going to run when they built Port William.”

He meant, I guess, that Port William has always been, and maybe too that it will always be. I think so. You could say that Port William has never been the same place two minutes together. But I think any way it has ever been it will always be. It is an immortal place. Some day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and a new Port William coming down from heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband, and whoever has known her before will know her then.

Writing about Port William to Virgil in his absence and distance, I realized that the story of even so small a place can never be completely told and can never be finished. It is eternal, always here and now, and going on forever.

 

I had begun my time of waiting. I was living my life, and yet I seemed somehow to be outside it, as if only when the war was over and Virgil came home would I be able to come back into my life and live again inside it.

And yet I knew I was fortunate beyond anything I might have expected or even dreamed. I had a place unquestionably my own in the world and in Virgil's family. It was a little awkward at first, with Virgil so suddenly gone, and nobody speaking of the fear we had most on our minds. But Mr. and Mrs. Feltner treated me as a daughter of the household, as they had before. And the life of the farm and the household was still undoubted in those days. It went on as it always had and as it needed to do, war or no war, and I did my part. The Feltners were hospitable people in the old way. There was always company, a lot of coming and going, even when we weren't feeding hands. There was plenty of work to be done, lots of housekeeping, lots of cooking and canning and preserving, butter-making, soap-making, washing and ironing, getting ready for company, cleaning up afterwards, looking after the old and the sick, seeing that the grandchildren, when they came visiting, would live to go home again. That was what Mrs. Feltner would say, giggling a little but also meaning it: “I just want them to live to go home.”

I loved taking part, I loved being welcomed to take part, but I knew, and the Feltners did too, that I needed to be working and earning on my
own. During the tobacco market in the fall and winter I took a job in the office of the Golden Leaf Warehouse, driving down to Hargrave every day with others from Port William who worked at the warehouses in the wintertime. The rest of the year, when I would work part-time for Wheeler Catlett or other office people in Hargrave when they needed me, I would often stay again at the Finley house with Auntie.

Time doesn't stop. Your life doesn't stop and wait until you get ready to start living it. Those years of the war were not a blank, and yet during all that time I was waiting. We all were waiting. This started as soon as Virgil left home, long before he went into the fighting. We all were holding something back inside ourselves that we didn't want to give to that time. None of us ever said, “Oh, if only this war would be over! Oh, if only Virgil can live through it! If only he can stay alive! If only he can make it home!” But we thought those things every day. We thought them and thought them. Each of us knew that the others were thinking them and praying them. And those thoughts made a strange silence among us that we lived around. I, and I think the others too, felt a certain reluctance to have pleasure, as if by waiting for pleasure, by putting it off, by keeping our lives pushed away from us to make enough room for the fear and worry, we might get Virgil safely through the war and home again. And then we would let ourselves live and be pleased entirely.

And yet pleasures came. It was a pleasure-giving house and place, a place we were glad to be. Farming went on, housekeeping went on, cooking went on, eating and sleeping went on, Port William's endless conversation about itself went on. Rationing came, and we joked about it.

Sometimes we would go down to Hargrave and have supper and an evening of rummy with Auntie. Sometimes she would come up to see us. Sometimes, on one of his legal or farming errands, Wheeler would leave Bess with us for an afternoon. She and Mrs. Feltner and I would sit in the living room and talk a long time, quietly, while the clock ticked on the mantel and the sun slowly dropped below the porch roof and shone through the front windows. Sooner or later Bess would say to me, “Well, what have you been reading?” And then she and I would talk about books.

Books were a dependable pleasure. I read more then than I ever was able to read again until now when I am too old to work much and am
mostly alone. Back then I read books that Bess and Auntie loaned to me and books from Mr. Feltner's mother's library that was still in her bookcases in the living room. She had been a reader like Bess and Auntie and had bought good books—classics, some of them: Mark Twain's river books and
The Scarlet Letter
and several thick novels by Sir Walter Scott and Dickens. I read
Old Mortality
and thought more than I wanted to of the horrible deeds people have done because they loved God, but it was a good story.

It was a pleasure too when Bess and Wheeler's boys came for long visits in the summertime. They were lively and they carried our thoughts with them out of the house and away from our worry. Or sometimes they took us into worries of another kind. Mrs. Feltner was inclined to foresee the worst.

“Have you seen the boys, Mat?” she would say if Mr. Feltner happened to come to the house.

“Not for an hour or so,” he would say. “You reckon we ought to start dragging the river?”

She would laugh at him and at herself. “No. But I do wish they'd stay away from that old quarry.”

“And out of the trees and out of the barn loft and off of the roofs,” Mr. Feltner would say, and go out again.

Bess, calling up from Hargrave, said, “What are the boys doing, Mother?”

And Mrs. Feltner said, “Going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.”

On warm evenings we would sit out on the front porch from supper until bedtime. There was no TV then, of course, and on weeknights little traffic on the road. It would be so quiet that you could hear other people talking on their front porches or a bunch of children off playing somewhere. Besides the night sounds of birds and insects, there would be just the human voices. Sometimes there would be conversation from porch to porch and back and forth across the road.

One August half the town brought chairs and benches to the slope below Mr. Feltner's feed barn where there were no trees, and we sat there late into the night, watching the stars fall.

We were living our lives. We were living the daily history of the households
and farms and stores and other work places of Port William. But those lives and that history were kept always ajar by the history of the fighting that came to us day by day as news and sometimes as gossip. Boys, and girls too, were going away into the armed services. Small red-bordered white flags would be hung in the front windows of houses, with a blue star for each son or daughter who was in the service. When the death notices came, the blue stars would be replaced by gold ones. We would hear. Somebody's son would be wounded or killed or lost, and the word from maybe the other side of the world would finally make its way home to some house where it had been so much feared it seemed almost familiar. And then, Port William being Port William, the knowledge would be in every house by the end of the day. You would do the little that could be done: fix some food for the family, pay a visit, say you were sorry, hug the mother or the sister or the widow. Part of the grief would be that the hurt or the dead one would be absent, thousands of miles away. Part of the grief would be that this loss made you somehow guilty, for you were lucky, you were spared, and yet it showed that the worst possibilities were real, for you as for the others.

When Grandmam died in her time in the spring of 1944, and we gave her to her rest at last in the graveyard at Shagbark and heard the beautiful psalm spoken over her, it seemed almost too orderly and natural to be sad.

 

On Sunday morning and Sunday night and on prayer meeting night, which was Wednesday, we would go to church and receive, it might be, a true blessing of consolation from some passage of Scripture, from one of the good old hymns, or from being together. And we would hear also a sermon in which poor Brother Preston would struggle again with his terrible duty and need to bring comfort to the comfortless, to say something in public that could answer the private fear and grief that were all around him, and he would mostly fail. We would shake his hand at the door as we went out, trying, I suppose, to console him for his wish to help what only could be endured.

One day we knew that Tom Coulter was dead somewhere in Italy. Nothing changed. There was no funeral, no place to send flowers or gather with the neighbors to offer your useless comfort. But this knowledge
had come. Jarrat and Burley looked and went about the place as they had before, and yet you knew that great suffering had come to them and they were carrying it in them. The light seemed to fall on us a shade darker. But they had their work to do, we had ours, and we went on.

 

The time when we didn't quite know what to do was when Virgil came home. That was in August of 1944. Two weeks. It was a time wedged between two absences, a time not so dangerous and a time of danger. Until then he had been on various bases in the states. When he went back, as we knew, he would be sent overseas and into the fighting. It was a time between times, almost a no-time. It was a no-time that led on to a time we could not imagine, and it made us strange to each other. We all were moving in wide circles around our sadness at the coming separation, unable to hide the care we were taking not to speak of what we were thinking.

Virgil was the easiest one of us. He tried hard to make his presence among us seem ordinary, and he succeeded well enough. He kept us talking, made us laugh, helped us to feel that we were doing all right. And yet nothing seemed quite ordinary enough to bring us to rest, not even him. He made visits to people and places, taking me with him, and we talked about everything but the future. He wandered down among the stores and loafing places and talked a while with the talkers and wandered back. He spent a good deal of time out on the place with his dad, working at jobs that mostly he would not see finished. The days were separate and suspended, like plants in hanging pots.

And then on the next-to-last evening we took a picnic, just the two of us, and walked back along the ridges to a place on the farthest one where we could look out over the river valley. It was a place I had never been before.

In a place like that you don't need to say much. For a while we just stood and looked. And then Virgil looked at me and smiled and gave me a little pat.

“I'll build you a house,” he said.

I said, “After the war?” I had been afraid to use those words. When I heard myself say them, I was troubled. I hadn't wanted him to hear my longing.

But he was looking steadily at me, and his smile didn't change. He said, “Now too. Now and always. How about here?”

And I said, “Anywhere with you.”

There were loose rocks lying around, pieces of old sea bottom, from how long ago? He began picking them up and placing them to mark the corners and doors of a house. As he laid them out, he named the rooms. When he was finished, he brought me in. As the day darkened he set down our basket and I sat down beside it. With dry sticks brought up from the woods, he made a little fire, and we ate our supper beside it.

Of all the kind things he did for me, that house was the kindest. It was a play house, a dream house sure enough, and yet it was the realest thing of all that time. In it we met and were together on the condition only of loving each other. We lived the dearest minutes of our marriage in that dream house, in the real firelight, under the real stars. And when Virgil went away that time I had something of him with me that I would keep.

Virgil disappeared sometime after the Battle of the Bulge. We received the notice—“missing in action,” with the official regret of the Secretary of War—on March 5, 1945. And what did “missing” mean? That nobody knew where he was? Or where his body was? Or that his body no longer existed, was nowhere, had been blown all into pieces or burnt into smoke that the wind blew away?

It is hard for me to think or speak of the time that came then. I remember it as dark. I can't remember the sun shining, though I'm sure it must have shone part of the time. I would think sometimes with a black sickness of fear and hopelessness and guilt, “What am
I
doing alive?” That was when I was sure that “missing” meant “dead.” At other times I would think, “Oh, he has
got
to be alive. They'll find him
somewhere.
” And that was a hope almost as fearful as hopelessness.

The pleasures that came then had a way of reminding you that they had been pleasures once upon a time, when it seemed that you had a right to them. Happiness had a way of coming to you and making you sad. You would think, “There seems to have been a time when I deserved such a happiness and needed it, like a day's pay, and now I have no use for it at all.” How can you be happy, how can you live, when all the things that make you happy grieve you nearly to death?