Hannah Coulter

Uncle Jack didn’t try to have dignity, he just had it. A man of great strength in his day, he walked now with a cane, bent a little at the hips but still straight-backed. He was a big man, work-brittle, and there was no foolishness about him.

  You would have thought Henry would not have dared to do it, but as we were going from the car to the house he ran in front of Uncle Jack and shot at him with his pistols. I didn’t think Uncle Jack would see anything funny in that, but he did. He gave a great snort of delight. He said, “That boy’ll put the cat in the churn.”

  And so we all were there.

  To get the children calmed down before dinner and so the little girls could have a nap afterwards, we opened the presents right away. The old parlor was crowded with the tree and the people and the presents and the pretty wrapping papers flying about. Nettie Banion and Joe and Aunt Fanny sat in the doorway, waiting to receive the presents everybody had brought for them. The boys sat beside Virgil, who was making a big to-do over their presents, in which he was still claiming half-interest. The boys were a little unsure about this, but they loved his carrying on, and they sat as close to him as they could get.

  There were sixteen of us around the long table in the dining room. The table was so beautiful when we came in that it seemed almost a shame not to just stand and look at it. Mrs. Feltner had put on her best tablecloth and her good dishes and silverware that she never used except for company. And on the table at last, after our long preparations, were our ham, our turkey and dressing, and our scalloped oysters under their brown crust. There was a cut glass bowl of cranberry sauce. There were mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and butter beans, corn pudding, and hot rolls. On the sideboard were our lovely cakes on cake stands and a big pitcher of custard that would be served with whipped cream.

  It looked too good to touch, let alone eat, and yet of course we ate. Grandmam sat at Mr. Feltner’s right hand at his end of the table, and Uncle Jack sat at Mrs. Feltner’s right hand at her end. Virgil and I sat opposite Bess and Wheeler at the center. And the children in their chairs and high chairs were portioned out among the grownups, no two together.

  Every meal at the Feltners was good, for Mrs. Feltner and Nettie Banion both were fine cooks, but this one was extra good, and there were many compliments. Of all the compliments Uncle Jack’s were the best, though he only increased the compliments of other people. He ate with great hunger and relish, and it was a joy to watch him. When somebody would say, “That is a wonderful ham” or “This dressing is perfect,” Uncle Jack would solemnly shake his head and say, “Ay Lord, it is that!” And his words fell upon the table like a blessing.

  Beyond that, he said little, and Grandmam too had little to say, but whatever they said was gracious. To have the two of them there, at opposite corners of the table, with their long endurance in their faces, and their present affection and pleasure, was a blessing of another kind.

  We were at the table a long time, and while we ate in the dining room, Nettie and Joe and Aunt Fanny ate in the kitchen. When the cakes and custard had been offered again, and everybody had said, “No, no more for me” or “I can’t eat another bite” or “I’m already foundered,” we were done at last. The men went back to the living room, the boys went to play outdoors, and Bess took the little girls to the quietest bedroom for their naps, while the rest of us women began to clear the table and wash the dishes and set things back to rights. For me, this was maybe the best part of all. We had the quiet then of women working together, making order again after the commotion and hurry of the meal. I have always loved the easy conversation of such times. That day everybody had something to remember, something that others also remembered, about other Christmases and about that day so far, and they told it to enjoy it again and to enjoy it together. When the dishes were all scraped up and stacked, Auntie and Aunt Lizzie and Aunt Fanny and Grandmam sat talking at the kitchen table while Mrs. Feltner and Nettie and I finished up.

  When everything was put away and neat again, and all the commotion of the meal seemed a low sound dying away behind us, and Nettie and Aunt Fanny had started home with their presents, we went in and sat with the men in the living room. The talk was easy and quiet there too. Mainly the older ones, out of courtesy to Grandmam, were asking about people they knew in common and testing their memories against one another.

  The day wound down. The Catlett girls woke up from their naps. The boys came in chilly from their play and sat in laps until they warmed up again, and then they wandered off. The talk began to have the sound it does when it is coming to an end. Finally Wheeler stood up and said to Bess, “I expect we’d better go.” Everybody got up then and began saying good-bye, collecting presents, getting their hats and coats.

  Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn’t know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

  6

  One of the Feltners, a Member of Port William

  And so I became one of the Feltners, and not in name only. I had my place and my work among them. They let me belong to them and to their place, and I needed to belong somewhere. I belonged to Grandmam as I always will, but I didn’t any longer belong in her place. Everybody understood that. When Virgil was called to the army in 1942, as we had feared and expected, there was no question but that I would stay on with Mr. and Mrs. Feltner.

  I could tell of my sorrow when Virgil went away, but it was not, strictly speaking, my sorrow. It was the sorrow of the family, of Port William, of the whole country. A great sorrow and a great fear had come into all the world, and the world was changing. I grew up, it seems to me, in the small old local world of places like Shagbark and Hargrave and Port William in their daily work and dreaming of themselves. I married Virgil in that world, which was his world too though he had been to college. It was the world of our vision of a new house between the old chimneys. It was the world of the Feltners’ Christmas dinner in 1941. But then, against the fires and smokes of the war, the new war of the whole world, that old world looked small and lost. We were in the new world made by the new war, into which Virgil and our possible life together had gone away, for a time as I hoped but in fact forever. Our minds were driven out of the old boundaries into the thought of absolute loss, absolute emptiness, in a world that seemed larger even than the sky that held it.

  I stayed on in a life that would have been mine and Virgil’s but now was only mine. I lived the daily life of Port William that he no longer lived but only read about in our letters.

  We all wrote to him, even the Catlett boys. Andy wrote, “Dear Uncle Virgil, I’m restless as a racehorse waiting for you to come home.” Like many a young wife of that time, I wrote every day, maybe not a whole letter every day, but at least a part of one, a sort of daily news report from “the home front.” As I increased my knowledge of Port William, I had more to write.

  The Coulter brothers, Jarrat and Burley, started cropping on the Feltner place during the war, and so I got to know them. I got to know Dorie and Marce Catlett, Wheeler’s parents; and Jayber Crow, the barber; and Athey and Della Keith, who had a good farm down in the river bottom and whose daughter, Mattie, was a little younger than I was; and Martin Rowanberry, known as “Mart,” who swapped work with the Coulters and hunted with Burley. Jarrat Coulter’s two sons, Tom and Nathan, were in the army too, and so was Arthur Rowanberry, “Art,” who was Mart’s older brother. And so when I wrote to Virgil, I didn’t want for something to tell.

  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 tim
e 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.