Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

“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.

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.

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 had a claim on him.

The Lords weren’t kin to the Feltners at all, except that Aunt Lizzie and Mrs. Feltner had been best friends when they were girls—which, Aunt Lizzie said, was as close kin as you could get.

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.

He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.

But he himself, though he would not have thought it, was the best present. He had no small talk and few of what are called social graces. He had a kind of courtesy that required few words, and with me a gentleness that was as deliberate and forceful as his bouquets of stolen flowers so roughly broken off. He would say, “Ay Lord, honey, you’re all right!” Or: “Here’s some flowers I brought you, pretty thing.” He knew that I was living in loss, that the baby had been born into loss. He knew, if anybody did, that there was nothing that could be done about it, nothing certainly that he could do, and yet he came. He came to offer himself, to be with us in Virgil’s absence, to love us without hope or help, as he had to do. This was a baby that needed to be stood by, and he stood by her.

She came to us like love between lovers, the answer to a need we would not have had if she hadn’t come.

She would wake up hungry in the night where she slept in her basket by my bed. I would turn on the light, change her diaper, and then turn the light off. The rest I did in the dark, by feeling. I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had flowed to me. It emptied me. As the baby fed, I seemed slowly to grow empty of myself, as if in the presence of that long flow of love even grief could not stand.

There came a time, long before she could talk, when we knew that she knew her name. There came a time when she began to return our hugs and kisses. There came a time when she began to play, and when Mr. Feltner began to play with her.

Soon enough Little Margaret was three years old, one of us, and Virgil was three years gone.

What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead.

I felt my grief for him made his death his own. My grief was the last meaning of his life in this world. And so I kept my grief. For a long time I couldn’t give it up.

The living can’t quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can’t because they don’t. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones. Little Margaret was calling me into life. A little ahead of me in time still, Nathan would be calling me into life.

No big happiness came to me yet, but little happinesses did come,