Hannah Coulter

  It was news to me that I wanted to live in Hargrave and get a job. But hearing Grandmam say so was a relief to me. All of a sudden I could feel myself taking form. I thought, “Yes, that would be all right. Yes, that is what I want to do.”

  “And she’s going to need a room,” Grandmam said.

  4

  Virgil

  Dr. Finley had been dead only a little more than a year when I came to live at Miss Ora’s. He had been an old-fashioned general practitioner, giving whatever help he could wherever it was needed through the Depression, and taking, I gathered, pretty cheerfully just what he could get of what was owed him. His income gave him and Miss Ora a good life in their good house, but nothing extra. After his death Miss Ora started renting rooms, mostly to tobacco buyers who would be there only during the winter.

  So that I wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with the men, she rented me her only downstairs bedroom with a little bathroom of its own. It was a snug, pretty room, with a bureau and bed and easy chair, and two big windows looking out across the shady lawn to the house next door. If I angled my line of sight enough, I could see, beyond a beautiful copper beech and a weeping willow, the opening of the river valley. With my few possessions that I brought with me to Hargrave, I had only two keepsakes: a picture of my mother and father not long after they were married, and a beautiful piece of embroidery made by Grandmam’s mother. I kept them on the bureau, for they were a consolation. I have them yet.

  Miss Ora’s house and the two on either side made a sort of neighborhood. There were no fences. Behind the three houses, the backyards mingled into one big garden, with hedges and arbors and lawns and trees and vegetable patches and flower borders that went back to the river bluff. From there you could see the river valley and the big river for a long way up and down. There were fern beds, and gateways with roses trellised over them, and tunnels through the hedges, and a pool with big goldfish, and a gazebo on the brink of the bluff.

  This was home to me during the simplest and in some ways the clearest little while of my life. I worked hard while I lived in Hargrave, but after I was settled it was an unworried time. I had never known such prettiness as I found at Miss Ora’s. Though she was not by any means a wealthy woman and was busy all the time herself, she had a wisdom that spread order and beauty around her. For me, Miss Ora’s was a place of rest. I can remember waking up there early in the morning in that quiet house and hearing the towboats sounding their whistles down in the fog, and a strange feeling of peace would come over me as if from another world.

  I had saved enough money to pay my rent and keep me eating for a while, I had enough presentable clothes, and if I ran short of anything I was to write to Grandmam. But I didn’t take anything for granted. The morning after I came to Miss Ora’s to live, I started looking for work.

  I was no good at it. I could work, I knew I could. I had worked at home all my life, and at school I had learned “secretarial skills.” As Grandmam had said, I was a good typist, pretty fast, and I knew shorthand. But as soon as I opened my mouth I sounded like I didn’t know anything. I was green as a bean and scared, and I sounded like it. There were people looking for jobs who looked and sounded a lot more capable than I did.

  I didn’t find work very soon, and for a while everything was just odd. I was discouraged and homesick. I missed Grandmam and the old place. I had never been much alone, and in Hargrave I didn’t know a soul but Miss Ora.

  But knowing Miss Ora was something. For me, in a way, it was everything. Grandmam had known what she was doing when she brought me to Miss Ora.

  To start with, Miss Ora knew what it was to be out of place and ignorant and lonely. If she thought I was sad, shut up in my room, she would come and peck twice with one knuckle on my door. “Oh, Hannah,” she would say, “don’t you want to come out and sit a while on the porch? It’s a lovely evening.” Or, “Hannah, come back to the kitchen and let’s have a cup of coffee. Or tea, if you’d rather.”

  “All women is brothers,” Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn’t know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.

  Miss Ora made me come out of my loneliness. She would ask me questions. She would tell me things. She was conscientiously standing in for Grandmam. And the things she told me, as I soon realized, were things she knew I needed to know. She was a reader, and she gave me books to read. She asked my opinion of them and talked to me about them. She didn’t approve of everything by “these modern writers,” and she talked about the things she didn’t approve of. She did this, as I could see, in a way she thought would be helpful to a young lady alone and away from home for the first time in “this modern world.”

  Before long, when we had got pretty well acquainted, she said, “You must make yourself at home here, Hannah.” She meant by that to give me the freedom of the house, as if I were not a renter, though not a daughter either, but maybe a close cousin. I used this freedom to help her any way I could with her work in the house and yard. It was a comfort to do the work, but I liked her too, and I wanted her to like me. I needed her to like me.

  And in the ordinary course of things I got to know her family. She had no nearby family of her own, but her sister-in-law was Margaret Feltner, and they were close. Margaret and Mat Feltner lived on a good-sized farm up at Port William. I don’t suppose you could say that any of the farmers around here prospered during the Depression, but Mr. and Mrs. Feltner had come through it all right—in one piece, you might say. They were quiet, comfortable people. Miss Ora would often have them down to supper, especially when Miss Ora’s younger sister, Lizzie, and her husband, Homer Lord, would be visiting from Indianapolis, and they would have a conversational game of rummy after they ate. Or Miss Ora would go up to Port William for two or three days at a time.

  The Feltners had a son, Virgil, who farmed with his dad and worked at a warehouse in Hargrave during the tobacco market, and a daughter, Bess, who was married to Wheeler Catlett. Wheeler was another Port Williamite, born and raised a farmer and a farmer still, but also a lawyer living in Hargrave with an office overlooking the courthouse square.

  So I was getting to know some people—some people, it would turn out, who would mean the world to me—but for what seemed to me a long, scary time I wasn’t finding any work. I had taken my savings out of the Shagbark bank when I left home and had never opened an account at Hargrave. I was keeping my money in a little tin box, and so I could see it dwindling away. I nearly wore out what I had left, counting it, hoping there would be more than I knew there was. I was writing to Grandmam two or three times a week, but since I was keeping my worries to myself I didn’t have much to tell her. I was dreading the day I would have to write and ask for money.

  Finally it was Wheeler Catlett who saved me. He knew, of course, from Miss Ora that I needed work and what my qualifications were, and so when his secretary, Miss Julia Vye, was taking a little vacation to visit some relatives in Tennessee, he took a chance and hired me to fill in.

  When he came to work in the morning, Wheeler was like a drawn bow —lean and tense and entirely aimed at whatever he had to do. Often he would already have seen to things on his farm before he came to the office, and maybe he would be a little late. He would run up the steps, bang open the door, greet whoever was waiting, and sit down at his desk, sometimes forgetting to take off his hat before he went to work.

  I would have his mail waiting for him. He would read it and then call me: “Come in, Hannah.” I would go in and we would get started on the day’s work. He dictated swiftly in strong, clear sentences that he seldom changed.

  Busy as he was, he nearly always took time to visit with the old farmers who would be in town on Saturdays and would come by to talk. They were men with long memories who loved farming and whose lives had been given to ideals: good land, good grass, good animals, good crops, good work. Wheeler loved listening to them, and he allowed them to feel that they h
ad a claim on him. One of them was Mr. Jack Beechum, Mat Feltner’s uncle, who, later, I would learn to call “Uncle Jack.” And there was Mr. Buttermore, who had many political complaints, mainly against the Republicans. I and whoever else was in the outer office would hear him saying loudly, “Wheeler, that damned fellow is so crooked he has to screw his socks on.”

  Also there was Mr. Sterns, a run-down old lawyer with lots of small dealings, who came in one morning, sat down by my desk, and started dictating letters to me. This was a regular happening, but I didn’t know it. I took down his letters, being polite, and when he was gone I told Wheeler.

  “Oh, type ’em up,” Wheeler said, going by. “It’s all right.”

  I had to work hard to keep up with Wheeler, and he was not easy to please. But I knew I had to please him. I needed the work. I needed to make a decent reputation for myself. I went to the office early and stayed late. As soon as I understood him, I saw to it that he didn’t have to wait on me for anything.

  And I did please him. After Miss Julia came back, Wheeler continued to call me in when he needed extra help. And on his word, as I knew, other lawyers in town began employing me in the same way. Sometimes I would stay with the Catlett children at night when Wheeler and Bess had somewhere to go. I wasn’t regularly employed yet, I wasn’t what you could call a “success,” but my little stock of money in the tin box quit shrinking and began to grow. I started a bank account.

  In the fall Miss Julia was sick for a while, and Wheeler asked me to come back. He was busy then, and, looking ahead to tax time when he would be busier, he said, “If you would like to, just stay on through the winter, and then we’ll see.”

  “I would like to,” I said.

  I had got to know Virgil Feltner when I would see him sometimes on his visits to Miss Ora—“Auntie,” he called her. He would stop by on his trips to Hargrave to see how she was, often bringing down a gift of fresh garden stuff or a frying chicken from his parents, and he and Miss Ora would sit and talk.

  I liked him right off. He was a rather large man, humorous and generous, always full of Port William news for his old auntie, and very pleasant to me. I thought that if ever I was going to marry, it would be good to marry somebody like him. I thought “like him” because it wasn’t possible for me to think that I would ever marry him himself. He was seven years older than I was and far above an uprooted poor girl from Shagbark. So it seemed to me.

  In fact, it wasn’t possible, then, to think that I was ever going to marry anybody. From the time I first went to work for Wheeler and began to get about in the town a little, I would be asked out on dates. I was asked more often than I went, but sometimes I went. They were passable young fellows, I suppose, my age or just about, but they didn’t interest me in the way I seemed to interest them. I would go out with one or another and find that I didn’t agree with his opinion that he was the best thing that had ever happened to me. None of them set me aflame with the desire to know him better. One of them I did actually have to ask, “Are you ready to try that in front of Grandmam?” He looked around as if somebody might be watching and said, “Hunh? What?” I can see now that Virgil had placed a mark in my mind that those others couldn’t measure up to.

  That fall I was working regularly in Wheeler Catlett’s office when Virgil began coming down from Port William every day to his winter job at the Golden Leaf Warehouse. I saw him more often after that. He would come in sometimes to see Wheeler on warehouse business, but more often, on the chance that Wheeler might not be too busy, just to visit. Both of them loved farming, and they loved bird hunting and bird dogs. Wheeler was older than Virgil by fifteen years, but, having started out as brothers-in-law, they had become friends.

  When Wheeler was busy and Virgil had to wait, he would talk to me. He always came in the late afternoons, and often it would be just the two of us talking together. It made me shy. He seemed to understand this, and he would get me to talk to him by asking me questions. He knew of the old friendship between his auntie and my grandmother. He would ask, “Have you heard anything new from your grandmother?” Or, “What’s going on up at Shagbark?” He would listen, and ask more questions, and then fall silent so I would have to ask him, “Well, how are things up at Port William?” and he would tell me. He called me “Miss Hannah.”

  And then he began bringing me gifts. They weren’t much, one rose maybe or the smallest possible box of candy. But they were a lover’s gifts. I knew it, and he knew I did. He meant for me to know it. He would present whatever it was with a little bow, pretending to be bashful, making fun of himself and yet honoring me.

  He would say, “You know, Miss Hannah, some of these days, when you’re older and I’m younger, I’m liable to marry you.”

  Things got a little complicated for me when Virgil began asking me out. Miss Ora knew about it, of course, and without being exactly blunt, she found ways to let me know it didn’t set well with her. She said once, “Virgil sometimes doesn’t use all the judgment he’s got.” And another time: “It’s time that boy was getting married, but I don’t know who around here would be good enough.” She could speak very firmly when she wanted to.

  I had to assume she was speaking for the family, though neither of Virgil’s parents nor Bess Catlett nor Wheeler ever said such things. I liked them all, and I didn’t want to think of myself as a problem to them. Also I pretty much agreed with Miss Ora. I would have had a hard time arguing that I was good enough for Virgil. I had Grandmam behind me, and she had been my foothold. I was proud of her. But I knew too that I also had my poor, unhappy father behind me, and Ivy, and Ivy’s boys, and our old farm up there that was looking more tattered and tumbledown every day now that Grandmam was slowing down and Ivy was coming to the fore. And I knew by then that even the wreckage of it was not going to be inherited by me. I could see too that Virgil was in every way a grown man who had found his work and liked it, and was at ease in the world. He was educated. He had been to college. How could I have missed the difference between him and me? I was a half lost, ignorant girl, trying to find my way into womanhood and a decent-paying job.

  And so I started refusing Virgil. I would say, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t go tonight.”

  He was courteous. He couldn’t easily assume that my reason was any of his business.

  But he kept asking. And finally he looked straight at me and said, “Why?”

  I wasn’t ready for that. Maybe I couldn’t have thought of lying to him. But I didn’t stop to think, either. I said, “Because you’re my landlady’s nephew.”

  Still looking at me, he smiled and then he grinned and then he laughed. I think he saw it all, but he didn’t say so. He said, “Fiddlesticks! Get your coat.”

  I admit I wanted to go. I wanted to be with him. But for a long time when we went out together it wasn’t what anybody would have called a “date.” We weren’t at first like a courting couple at all. He would take me to supper, or to a movie or one of the traveling shows that used to come around in those days, and then straight home. He was thinking of me as an innocent girl, and he was being considerate, as offish and careful of me as if I were a China doll, or as if Grandmam were watching. He was nice to me, thoughtful and generous in every way, but he never even held my hand. He never gave me the least reason to say, “Are you ready to try that in front of Grandmam?” I knew that he was admirable and I admired him, but I knew too that I had begun to sort of wish he would try something.

  Only now and then, in the midst of teasing me or carrying on, he would say, “Miss Hannah, some of these days, when you’re grown up, I’m probably going to marry you.”

  And at Christmas he brought me a present, nothing extravagant even by the standards of those days. It was a slender silver bracelet, the prettiest thing I had ever owned.

  Not much changed between us for a long time after that. Except for the way we each felt, which we never spoke about, it was just a friendship. Or it was meant to look like a friendship. For Miss Ora’s sake, and
so for mine, I could see that Virgil was trying hard to make it look so.

  When he came to get me at the house and when he brought me home, always early, he would sit for a while and visit, paying no special attention to me. And he rarely asked me out more than once a week. However convincing he may have been to Miss Ora, he did make things more comfortable for me.

  And then, as the days lengthened past the spring equinox and the weather warmed, a change began to take place. Within the old appearance of friendship and Virgil’s strict regard for me, something new began to form itself. Often now, instead of going to a show, we would drive in his car through the long evenings, looking at the waking-up country, and often we would stop at some high open place along one of the rivers and look at the country under the moonlight or starlight. And Virgil started talking to me in a different way. He began telling me the things I needed to know in order to know him. He told me what was happening up on his father’s place as they were coming to the end of the winter feeding and beginning the spring work. It was better farming by a long way than my own father had ever done. Virgil spoke of how he liked the season and its work, and of what it meant to him. The mule teams were shedding their winter coats and beginning to shine as they left the barn in the early light to begin the day’s work. Virgil spoke of that as something old in the world that caused an ancient happiness in him. He was trying to show me the shape of his life, and what might become the shape of it. He was seeing the time to come as a possibility, as a life that he loved. And though maybe neither of us fully understood what he was doing, he made me love it. It wasn’t as though I was being swept away by some irresistible emotion. The thought of resistance never entered my mind. When I imagined him entering the life he saw, I imagined myself entering it too. It was becoming a possibility that belonged to us both.