Hannah Coulter (14 page)

In 1949, anyhow, we put in our first full year of farming on our place. We started our garden as early as the ground would work and kept it going until the last greens froze down in November. We grew our tobacco again, added a crop of corn, and sowed our first wheat on the croplands in the fall. We got a second milk cow. Through the winter, working at odd times and with whatever help he could get, mostly from Jarrat and Burley and Danny Branch, Nathan had made the old fences stocktight. And in the spring, when the grass had come, we bought our first cattle and sheep. In the fall, after the corn was gathered, we bought our first hogs. As they found time during the summer, Nathan, mowing, and Danny, grubbing ahead of him with an axe, cleared the pastures of weeds and bushes so that the grass began to thrive. Nathan said, “It's beginning to look like somebody lives here.”

We didn't have money to do much renovation of anything except the land itself. We had to put the farm to work the first thing. But that year too, we got the barns and other buildings secured on their footings and patched up to the point of usability. We still faced years of work in restoring and improving our place, of doing what we could do for it, of making it capable of doing what it could do for us, but by the end of
1949 we had mostly stopped it from running down, and in some ways it was already getting better.

When Danny and Lyda married and settled in with Burley the next year, that solidified the family work force for the next good many years to come. We were four men then, and two women. But in addition to ourselves, a whole company of other people, at different times, in different combinations, might be at work on our place, or we might be at work on theirs. They were Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, Joe and Nettie Banion, Art and Mart Rowanberry, Big Ellis and his wife, Annie May, Elton and Mary Penn, and Andy and Henry Catlett, who in 1950 were just big boys. Of course, we didn't all work together all the time. Sometimes we worked alone. Sometimes Burley alone would team up with Big Ellis or the Rowanberrys. Or Nathan and Elton would work together, or either or both of them with the Rowanberrys. The Catlett boys more often than not would be working for Elton. Mr. Feltner and Joe Banion would go where they were needed.

But there were times too, mainly during the tobacco harvest, when we would all be together. The men would go early to have the benefit of the cool of the morning. The women would finish their housework and then gather, sometimes bringing dishes already cooked, to lay on a big feed at dinnertime; and then, after the dishes were done, they would go out to help in the field or the barn for the rest of the day. Uncle Jack Beechum too would often be on hand to do the little he could, to praise the work of the younger men, and of course to eat with us and pass his compliments over the food.

This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. Andy Catlett, remembering Burley, still calls it that. And I do. This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. Joe Banion grew a crop on Mr. Feltner, but also drew a daily wage. The Catlett boys too were working for wages, since they had no crop. The others of us received no pay. The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when
we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life “and never took a cent of money.”

The membership includes the dead. Andy Catlett imagines it going back and back beyond the time when all the names are forgotten. The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it. Or they leave it, as my children have done.

Now nearly all of the membership of 1950 are dead. The still living members are mainly Danny and Lyda Branch and their descendents, the Catletts, who are still here, and me, for the little use I am. There is no longer a Feltner in Port William. The Rowanberrys all are gone. Big Ellis and Annie May were childless. Elton and Mary Penn's children, like mine, have moved away. When I am gone the name of Coulter too will be gone from Port William, most likely forever.

And so an old woman, sitting by the fire, waiting for sleep, makes her reckoning, naming over the names of the dead and the living, which also are the names of her gratitude. What will be remembered, Andy Catlett, when we are gone? What will finally become of this lineage of people who have been members one of another? I don't know. And yet their names and their faces, what they did and said, are not gone, are not “the past,” but still are present to me, and I give thanks.

 

Joe Banion's was the first death. Oftentimes I think of him and of his people, never very numerous in Port William, but here with us from the beginning, members of us, though now entirely gone. Their story here is a sorrow. It was always incomplete, and its ending did not complete it.

Joe died suddenly of a heart attack in 1951. Nettie and Aunt Fanny could have stayed. They would have been welcome, and they knew it. But with Joe gone, they chose to go. They gathered up their belongings and, with Mr. Feltner's and Nathan's help, moved to Cincinnati to be near Nettie's sister, who had moved up there when she married, a long time before. They thought it would be a comfort to be with kinfolks, and maybe there was some charm for them in going north of the great river that had divided slavery from freedom.

I remember the Feltners' grief and my own when Joe died, and again when Nettie and Aunt Fanny went away, and again when Mr. and Mrs. Feltner visited them in their apartment in Cincinnati and found them there but not at home there, and not to be at home again in this world.

If they were going to be at home anywhere it would have had to be in Port William. The Banions belonged to the Feltner place by the same history as the Feltners, going back a hundred and fifty years. The two families belonged to each other. The Banions had been faithful to the place, and their work had gone into it, year after year, generation after generation. The Feltners had been faithful in return, and had favored them beyond the custom. The two families had the same history, they remembered the same things, they knew the same things, there was affection and loyalty between them, and love. And yet the story is incomplete. Its ending was not satisfactory. Nettie and Aunt Fanny had too little to take with them when they left. It was too easy for them to leave. And yet when they left, they were leaving home.

We learned these things by our grief. By our loss too.

 

My children were born into that story, and into the membership that the story is about, and into the place that was home to the membership, and home to them too as long as they wanted such a home. We brought them up, teaching them as well as we could the things the place would require them to know if they stayed.

And yet, like Nettie and Aunt Fanny, they too chose to go.

When she was about four years old, Little Margaret sincerely believed that when she grew up she was going to marry Burley Coulter. She was not the first young woman to have thought of such a thing.

He would have been in his mid-fifties then and was still an attractive man, as he would continue to be for a long time. If you were a woman and inclined to like him, you would have been more or less in love with him.

Once, after Lyda and Danny Branch had married and come to live with Burley, and he had made them at home with him and himself with them, I asked Lyda, “Have you ever thought what it would have been like to be in love with him when he was young?” And Lyda said, “Oh! Wouldn't
he
have been an armful?”

When he was young, Burley was as wild as you please. He caused a lot of trouble for himself and for other people. He had the gift of construing the trouble into a joke. The joke was almost always on himself, and was a good joke, and so the people who cared about him and were troubled by him almost always forgave him. And so he managed to be wild without being more than temporarily disowned by the family or the neighbors. To use his word, he continued to be a member because they wanted him to be. To use another of his words, he was a wayward member. Later, he was a member because
he
wanted to be.

What changed him, I think, was the death of his sister-in-law. After that, the elder Coulters took Tom and Nathan to raise. A certain responsibility for the boys fell to Burley then. He had not asked for any such responsibility, but he accepted it when it came, and it made him responsible. It made him tender too. He did his part in bringing up his brother's sons, and when his own son, Danny Branch, came along, he did his part for him.

But Burley didn't change completely. He remained always capable of disappearing off into the woods with his hounds, sometimes for days at a time. Until he was old, he could be attracted into what he and his friend Jayber Crow called “celebrations.” He didn't think of marrying Danny's mother until too late. All the same, he was good, he was funny, and as much as anybody I ever knew he was interesting.

I would ask him to do something, and he would give me a look that managed to be mocking, respectful, tender, loving, and flirtatious all at once. He would say, “Yes, mam, honey.”

Or when a gang of us would be at work in the barn or the stripping room, he would preach the membership, mocking a certain kind of preacher, yet meaning every word he said:

“Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, we are members one of another. The difference, beloved, ain't in who is and who's not, but in who knows it and who don't. Oh, my friends, there ain't no nonmembers, living nor dead nor yet to come. Do you know it? Or do you don't? A man is a member of a woman and a worm. A woman is a member of a man and a mole. Oh, beloved, it's all one piece of work.”

“Many hands make light work,” Art Rowanberry used to say, and that is right, up to a point. And there is a certain kind of talk that lightens work too. Burley was a master of that. When the work was hard or hot or miserable, or when we were suffering our weariness at the end of a long day, we would hear him singing out: “It's root, hog, or die, boys! I was kicked out of Hell for playing in the ashes! All I want is a good singleline mule and a long row!”

If we were hard at it in the hog killing, he would shout, “Thirty years in a slaughter house and never cut a gut!”

Burley, carrying on. He was faithful, not swift. He would be at the tail end of a crew working across a field, and you would hear him holler, mocking himself, “Follow me, boys! You'll wear diamonds!”

Sometimes as we worked together he would tell stories. That would usually be when there were children around, but all of us would listen.

He told the story of the big picnic that we never had but were always going to have “one of these days.”

He told of the time when he was a teamster for Barnum and Bailey's Circus, which he never was, but the idea had caught his fancy, and he made us imagine him driving a team of six spirited black horses with plumes on their headstalls, drawing a wagon loaded with pretty women.

He told of the time he went fishing and the mosquitoes were so big and fierce that he had to take shelter under a lard kettle, and the mosquitoes' beaks were so tough and sharp that they pierced the iron and came through, and he picked up his hammer and clenched their beaks, and the mosquitoes flew off with his kettle.

Jarrat or Nathan always said, “How come you took a lard kettle and a hammer with you when you went fishing?”

And Burley always said, “Some of you fellows don't know
anything.
I been farther around the frying pan looking for the handle, than you ever been away from home.”

He told of the night he went to the fair at Hargrave: “I got to feeling pretty good, and I went to this gypsy to get my fortune told. I sat down at her table and shoved her over a quarter. She looked me right straight in the eye and shoved my quarter back. She said, ‘I can't tell your fortune. You haven't got anything in your mind.' She was right, too. An honest woman. My head was as empty as a gourd.”

He told about going courting one night in a buggy. It was a dark night. It was a weedy place. Backing up to turn around, he backed the buggy onto a sleeping cow, who stood up and turned the buggy over.

Nathan would ask him, “What were you doing courting in a buggy in a pasture?”

And Burley would say, “Now you're wanting to know facts.”

He told about the man who bored a hole in the bottom of his boat to let the water out.

He told about the man who woke up dead.

 

Little Margaret, and the boys when they came along, were always after him for stories. “Uncle Burley, tell us a story. Tell us a story, Uncle Burley.” They told “Uncle Burley stories” to each other. The boys both went
through times when they wanted to be “just like Uncle Burley” when they grew up.

And so he was the best kind of uncle. The children took a lot of pleasure in him, and maybe for that reason he could require them to take him seriously when he was serious. He could settle them down or talk sense to them or get work out of them sometimes when Nathan and I couldn't. I remember a day when Mattie was about fifteen and we were in the tobacco cutting. We had several loads to unload before we could quit. The day had got long, and it was going to get longer. It was hot and close, threatening rain, and we were trying to hurry. But all of a sudden Mattie dropped down out of the tiers onto the wagon and sat down.