Hannah Coulter

by Wendell Berry

We had, you could say, everything but money—Grandmam and I did, anyhow. We had each other and our work, and not much time to think of what we didn’t have.

just seemed that, as we waited together for the coming of this life, it had become wrong to sit apart.

Sometimes too I could see that love is a great room with a lot of doors, where we are invited to knock and come in. Though it contains all the world, the sun, moon, and stars, it is so small as to be also in our hearts. It is in the hearts of those who choose to come in. Some do not come in. Some may stay out forever. Some come in together and leave separately. Some come in and stay, until they die, and after.

She was needed, and then there she was among us, growing and changing every day, a living little girl, one of us. At first she was only present, enclosed mostly in her own small being. And then, we could see it happening, she began to look out of her eyes. She began to see the light from the windows. She began to see us. She began to know us. She began to look at us and smile, as if greeting us from a world we did not know or had forgotten. She made sounds at first that were just sounds, and then she made sounds that were answers and sounds that were calls.

The house, its furnishings and surroundings, took on the appearance given it by my ways of work and my liking, just as Nathan’s work and his liking altered the looks of the farm. And as our work shaped our workplaces, our work and our workplaces shaped our days. Our work brought us together and drew us apart. Sometimes we would be together only at mealtimes and at night. Sometimes we would be together at the same work most of the day. We had differences. There were the agreed-on differences of work. There were the accepted, mostly happy differences between a man and a woman. There were the differences of nature and character that were sometimes happy and sometimes not. Some of the things that most endeared Nathan to me—his quietness, his love of his work, his determination—were the things that could sometimes make me maddest at him.

This was not something I did by deliberate intention but was just something I did. When we were both mad, we would have something to say to each other. It wasn’t love, but it beat indifference, and sooner or later, mostly sooner, it would come to love.

You have had this life and no other. You have had this life with this man and no other. What would it have been to have had a different life with a different man? You will never know. That makes the world forever a mystery, and you will just have to be content for it to be that way.

The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?

The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

You send your children to college, you do the best you can for them, and then, because you have to be, you’re careful not to make plans for them. You don’t want to be disappointed, and you don’t want to burden them with your expectations either. But you keep a little thought, a little hope, that maybe they’ll go away and study and learn and then come back, and you’ll have them for neighbors. You’ll have the comfort of being with them and having them for companions. You’ll have your grandchildren nearby where you can get to know them and help to raise them. But that doesn’t happen often anymore, and you know better than to hope too much. Or you ought to.

I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown. He fits my love, but he no longer fits the place or our life or the knowledge of anything here. Since a long time ago, when he has come back he has come as a stranger. He and his wife and their children and I are strangers. We spend two or three days trying mightily to be nice to one another, and even succeeding, but we remain strangers. We don’t know the same things. We have nothing in common to talk about. We don’t always agree about the news, and so we avoid that. I ask about their lives, but they have little confidence that I can understand their lives, and they don’t tell me much. The conversation, to keep itself going, keeps circling back to Port William, to things Mattie remembers, to people he used to know—memories, you can tell, that seem a little odd to him now, as if from another life—while his wife smiles and pretends to be interested, and the children play on the floor with the toys they have brought and pay no attention.

They don’t know the things that I and even their daddy have known since before we knew anything.

And what ever in their lives will they think of the old woman they will barely remember who yearned toward them and longed to teach them to know her a little and who wanted to give them more hugs and kisses than she ever was able to?

And then Nathan said, “Hannah, my old girl, we’re going to live right on. We’ll love each other, and take care of things here, and we’ll be all right.”

And what of Caleb? Caleb eventually became Dr. Coulter. He became a professor, teaching agriculture to fewer and fewer students who were actually going to farm. He became an expert with a laboratory and experimental plots, a man of reputation. But as I know, and as he knows in his own heart and thoughts, Caleb is incomplete. He didn’t love farming enough to be a farmer, much as he loved it, but he loved it too much to be entirely happy doing anything else. He is disappointed in himself. He is regretful in some dark passage of his mind that he thinks only he knows about, but he can’t hide it from his mother. I can see it in his face as plain as writing. There is the same kind of apology in him that you see in some of the sweeter drunks. He is always trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.

Freedom, to him, was being free of being bossed and of being a boss.

He nodded. He knew what I meant. It used to be that we sort of knew, we could sort of guess, how the lives closest to us would end, what beds our dearest ones were likely to die in, and who would be with them at the last. Now, in this world of employees, of jobs and careers, there is no way even to imagine.

When they get to retirement age, Margaret and Mattie and Caleb will be cast out of place and out of mind like worn-out replaceable parts, to be alone at the last maybe and soon forgotten. “But the membership,” Andy said, “keeps the memories even of horses and mules and milk cows and dogs.”

The only people here were just this aging couple, getting a little too small for their skin, their hair turning white, standing it might be in the middle of the kitchen or the garden or the barn lot, hugging each other the way the hungry eat, in a hurry for night to fall. We still had the children to think about and worry about, of course, wherever they were, and our work always ahead of us, and the place always around us with its needs and demands, and yet for a while there I would think that this, this right now, was all the world that I held in my arms. It was like falling in love, only more than that; we knew too much by then for it to be only that. It was knowing that love was what it was, and life would not complete it and death would not stop it. While we held each other and our old desire came upon us, eternity flew into time like a lighting dove.

When love for a place is not living in it, you will know just by driving by it on the road. This

Distance and difference had come between us, and we all knew it. But it was a possible future, and it was a gift. It signified to her that she could think beyond that day, that the world extended beyond any line that Marcus had drawn or could draw, that life was still generous, that she had in fact a life to live.

Living without expectations is hard but, when you can do it, good. Living without hope is harder, and that is bad. You have got to have hope, and you mustn’t shirk it. Love, after all, “hopeth all things.” But maybe you must learn, and it is hard learning, not to hope out loud, especially for other people. You must not let your hope turn into expectation.

Life without expectations was still life, and life was still good. The light that had lighted us into this world was lighting us through it. We loved each other and lived right on. We sat down to the food we had grown and ate it and praised it and were thankful for it. We suffered the thoughts of the nights and at dawn woke up and went back to work. The world that so often had disappointed us and made us sorrowful sometimes made us happy by surprise.

You look around presently, and it is summer. It has been dry a while, maybe, and now it has rained. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand. Every puddle in the lane is ringed with sipping butterflies that fly up in a flutter when you walk past in the late morning on your way to get the mail.

You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind.

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.

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.

And then the truth came to him, and he faced it. After that, he was loitering, putting us off, giving himself a chance to be captured by his death before he could be captured by the doctors and the hospitals and the treatments and the tests and the rest of it. When he consented to go to the doctor he was only consenting for the rest of us to be told what he already knew. He was dying.

“Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.”

He didn’t want his death to be the end of a technological process. I nodded.

I knew that he didn’t have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it. It was turning fast. To slow it down or stop it and come to a place that was moving with the motion only of time and loss and slow grief was more, that day, than he could imagine.

I knew too that it was more than he could bear. He is in a way given over to machines, but he is not a machine himself. Right then, he could not bear the thought of coming back to stand even for a few hours by his dead father in the emptiness he once had filled. He said he would come as soon as he could.

had to think of all it had cost, of all the engines that had run, just to give one man a few minutes of ordinary grief at his dad’s funeral, but I was completely glad to see him.