Free Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry Page A

through that bad time, when Virgil’s absence was wearing into us, when “missing” kept renaming itself more and more insistently as “dead” and “lost forever,” I was yet grateful. 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.
    Mr. and Mrs. Feltner were a refuge to me. They were a shelter. They just freely gave me whatever they had that they could see I needed. They were always trying to fill the blank that they felt around me. When my pains began on the night of the sixteenth of May, the three of us rode together down to the hospital in Hargrave, Mr. Feltner driving the old car somehow gently, as if the future of the whole world rode in it. They stayed with me through the night, and were there to see the baby almost as soon as she was born. I named her Margaret after Mrs. Feltner, as I thought Virgil would have wanted to do, and as I wanted to do.
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    When he heard about the baby, my father came. Since Grandmam’s death, he had stayed on the old place, farming it now as the tenant of the heirs, namely himself and his brothers and sisters, he being one of six. The times were good for farming then, for a little while, but I knew the farm was running down, for its half a dozen new owners could not agree on much of anything, and would spend almost nothing on upkeep and repairs. Ivy was in charge by then, to the extent that anybody was. As a farmer, my father had declined from his mother’s tenant to his wife’s hand. And his brothers and sisters, who had five different opinions about everything, were afraid of Ivy and blamed my father for whatever they thought was wrong.
    Maybe remembering Grandmam’s judgment in such matters, he left his latest old car down in front of Jayber Crow’s barber shop and walked
up to the house, where he presented himself at the back door. Mrs. Feltner of course welcomed him as she would have welcomed a wise man from the east and brought him to the bedroom where I was lying with the baby and placed a chair for him by the bed.
    He was wearing what always passed with him for his Sunday best—a clean pair of bib overalls, a clean work shirt buttoned at the neck, and the jacket of the brown suit he had bought to marry my mother in. He laid his old best felt hat on the floor as carefully as if it had been made of glass. He was fifty-three years old.
    Over the years he seemed to have shrunk, trying to make himself invisible to Ivy, or maybe to God. The jacket had begun to look too big for him. I knew he had come in secret. Ivy didn’t know where he was.
    I told him my news and asked for his. Elvin and Allen were long gone by then, but I asked about them.
    They were living up somewhere about Lexington, he said. Ivy didn’t hear from them much. He reckoned they were all right.
    And how was Ivy?
    Ivy was fine. She missed her boys, and was suffering some from the rheumatism, but she was fine.
    He too, he said, was fine.
    I handed him the baby. “This is Margaret, your granddaughter,” I said.
    He took her and held her awkwardly and gently on his lap and looked down at her a long time, unable to speak.
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    Almost from her first day we called her “Little Margaret.” She was another gift, surely, to us all. She was a happiness that made me cry. And I was not the only one. I saw, and pretended I didn’t see, Mrs. Feltner and Bess and Nettie Banion crying as they rocked her in their arms. We were all thinking, “Poor little child! Where’s her daddy?”
    Uncle Jack Beechum had left his farm by then and moved into the old hotel in Port William. At the oddest times, and sometimes to Mrs. Feltner’s exasperation, he would come to visit me. He would sit by my bed or my