Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

to her:
    Juber this and Juber that,
Juber skint a yeller cat.
    And he sang to her:
    Old hound dog stole a middlin’
Many long years ago.
    And:
    Did you ever see a spider on the wall,
A spider on the wall,
A spider on the wall?
Did you ever see a spider on the wall,
A spid—er—on—the—wall?
    She could sing that spider song before she could talk.
    Soon enough she could talk, and walk, and run, and feed herself after a fashion, and have opinions, and admire her pretty clothes, and make demands. Uncle Jack was careful not to impose himself on her, for fear
of offending her, and so she imposed herself on him. She would stand in front of him until he leaned down from his bigness and smiled at her and called her “pretty thing.” And she would lift her arms to him.
    As if all of a sudden, we couldn’t imagine the world without her. She was a part of it, as much as we were, as much as Port William itself was.
    Did we spoil her? I can honestly say that I at least didn’t spoil her, I was so afraid that she would be a bother to her grandparents and not deserve their love. I sort of knew that she didn’t have to deserve their love, but I was strict with her. Mrs. Feltner, for one, thought I was too strict, and eventually I saw that she was right.
    She said to me one day when I was correcting Little Margaret for something that didn’t much matter, “Honey, there are some things it’s just better not to see.”
    Another time, when I had said, “I don’t want to spoil her,” Mrs. Feltner said, “Oh, Hannah, I always like to see ’em spoiled a little bit. It means somebody loves ’em.”
    Soon enough Little Margaret was three years old, one of us, and Virgil was three years gone.
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    After we lost Virgil, I grieved for our unknowing love, and for the life we might have lived if we had been allowed to live it. I so much wanted what was lost. It had turned out to be only a hopeless hope, a dream, but I wanted it.
    Grieved as I was, half destroyed as I sometimes felt myself to be, I didn’t get mad about Virgil’s death. Who was there to get mad at? It would be like getting mad at the world, or at God. What made me mad, and still does, were the people who took it on themselves to speak for him after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say. Was Virgil a hero? In his dying was he willing to die, or glad to sacrifice his life? Is the life and freedom of the living a satisfactory payment to the dead in war for their dying? Would Virgil think so? I have imagined that he would. But I don’t know. Who can speak for the dead? Who can speak for the dead whose bodies are never found, who are forever “missing”? Who can speak for a young man gone clean out of the world, whose body was maybe blown all to nothing, in the midst of terrible fear or pain, in the midst of his last prayer?

    What I know is this. Virgil loved his life. He loved me. He loved his family. He did not want to die. He wanted to come home and live with me and raise a family, and farm with his dad. He knew we were going to have a baby. He never knew he had a daughter. He never knew her name.
    I don’t mean to be quarrelsome, but the dead are helpless. I was the mother of a helpless baby, and the wife of a dead man who was just as helpless. The living must protect the dead. Their lives made the meaning of their deaths, and that is the meaning their deaths ought to have. I hated for Virgil’s death to be made official. I hated for it to be a government property or a public thing. I felt my grief for him made his death his own. My grief was the last meaning of his life in this world. And so I kept my grief. For a long time I couldn’t give it up.
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    There have been times, then and later too, when I thought I could cry forever. But I haven’t done it. There was war and rumors of war. “There