Free Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry Page B

chair, watching over me and the baby without exactly looking at us, saying little. He loved me first on Virgil’s account, as I knew, but then on my own and the baby’s. This was the tenderness of an old man whose love had abided the desire for women for a long time, and had known
happiness and hardship and longing and satisfaction and death and grief, and had somehow become innocent again. It was a love almost not of this world, and yet entirely of it. He brought me presents—little sacks of penny candy with their necks twisted shut, or little bouquets from neighbors’ flower beds to which he helped himself.
    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.
    And he needed her, I think. We all needed her. Even Ernest Finley, an unhappy man, would lean on his crutches and look at her and smile. We didn’t know how much we needed her until she came among us, and then we knew. She came to us like love between lovers, the answer to a need we would not have had if she hadn’t come.
    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.
    To know that I was known by a new living being, who had not existed until she was made in my body by my desire and brought forth into the world by my pain and strength—that changed me. My heart, which seemed to have had only loss and grief in it before, now had joy in it also. I felt myself setting out with that “Little Margaret” into the world and into her life.
    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. And the next thing I knew I would be waking up to daylight in the room and Little Margaret still sleeping in my arms.
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    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. Mrs. Feltner was a devoted grandmother, but she didn’t play. Mr. Feltner was the one who played. When he was in the house and Little Margaret wasn’t asleep, he would have her on his lap, teaching her to play patty-cake while she laughed and held to his thumbs. He recited rhymes