Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry Page A

Maybe it’s only then that things can work themselves out. The next chance Nathan caught, he said, “I want to talk to you.”
    â€œWell, start talking,” I said.
    â€œNot here.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œOver at the Cuthbert place. Up on the ridge there. Behind the house.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œLate this evening. After supper.”
    â€œMaybe I will.”
    Because I needed to walk and to be alone, I often made a quiet wander after supper. I like that time of day. I like to see the country lying still under the changing light and the coming darkness.
    It wasn’t far, half a mile maybe, back across the ridges toward the opening of the river valley that I could see from the highest ground. At the ramshackle line fence I stepped over from a good farm, well kept for a long time, onto a poor place covered with the marks and signs of neglect. I had to pick my way then, following old grazing paths among
young cedar and redbud and locust trees and patches of sumac and blackberry briars. But I knew where the old house was and the ridge behind it, and my winding way took me there. The sun was down. As I walked, the moist evening air bore up around me the good weedy smell of the old pasture.
    Nathan was standing among some cedars about as tall as he was. He had heard me coming, or he had known the direction the overgrowth would force me to come from, if I came, for he was facing me. He was standing as quietly as the trees. I was close to him before I saw him, and then I stopped.
    It would be a while before either of us moved. But now I was facing him. We were looking straight at each other. I felt a shiver go over me, but I didn’t move. I could have cried, but I didn’t cry. I had not returned his look before. And now he smiled and nodded, as if to thank me.
    And then we looked away from each other. Nathan turned a little and we looked down the slope toward the paintless old house and barns and outbuildings. It was getting dark.
    Finally he said, “Well, what would you call this?”
    â€œI guess,” I said, “you’d still have to call it a farm.”
    He said, “It’ll never be what it was. It could be better than it is.”
    We had a little conversation then about the place, what it needed, what could be done, what it offered.
    I said, “It, plus what you see in it, plus what you want from it, could be a farm.”
    He turned and looked at me again. I could hardly see his eyes, but I felt his look.
    He said, “It’s not the Feltner place,” and he meant it as a question. He was asking if I would marry him, and I trembled.
    â€œI wasn’t born on the Feltner place,” I said. “I was born on such a place as this.”
    We were looking at each other, though we could barely see. It was almost dark. But to know you love somebody, and to feel his desire falling over you like a warm rain, touching you everywhere, is to have a kind of light. When a woman and a man give themselves to each other, they have a light between them that nobody but them can see. It doesn’t shine outward into time. They see only each other and what is between
them. If it’s only an old run-down, overgrown, disregarded farm they have between them, they see that and they see each other, though everything else is dark.
    â€œI know you’re afraid,” he said. “And so am I. But can you see a life here?”
    I went to him then, and he hugged me. We didn’t kiss, not then, not yet. I laid my cheek against him and smelled the smell of his clean shirt and, within it, the smell of him, himself. I put my arms around him then and hugged him as tight as I could. Now that this thing that he had wanted to happen had finally started to happen, maybe he thought I was never going to turn him loose. I wanted to hold and protect and save him forever.

9
    Generosity
    Nathan and I turned away from the war and saw the future shining before us. The