Hannah Coulter Read Online Free

tempted by the boys I went out with, though they were good boys and I liked them well enough. I knew that I was a temptation to them, but I had not yet met anybody who even Grandmam would have seen as much of a threat to my future. She had told me exactly what to do if ever anybody got fresh with me. I was to remove their hand firmly from wherever they had put it, look them directly in the eye, and say, “Are you ready to try that in front of Grandmam?” But it was going to be a while before I let things go that far.

3
    The Future Shining Before Us
    We were the class of 1940. After we graduated that spring and I had made my speech at the commencement exercises about “the future that lies shining before us,” I had to start wondering what was going to become of me. Now that I was a high school graduate, I felt that I was a grown woman with a life to live and the future, shining or not, before me. I had an idea of freedom, too. I was wanting to leave home. The bad feeling and the ongoing resentment of Ivy and her boys had begun to be a prison to me. Even my good life with Grandmam seemed not enough to keep me there with the whole world waiting, it seemed like, for me to come out into it. But I was lazy-minded and scared too, and was letting myself just drift along, nowhere near to packing my things and saying, “Well, good-bye. I’m going.”
    But it wasn’t very long before Grandmam saved me any further trouble by making up my mind for me. This was her last gift to me.
    One morning when we were finishing our breakfast, she put down her coffee cup and sat looking at me. She did that for maybe a minute, letting me know that she was going to say something important.
    And then she said, “Child, dear Hannah, you’re grown up now. You have graduated from school. You’re a valedictorian. You’re smart, and you can do things. This is not the right place for you. You need to go.”
    My throat ached and I felt tears on my face, for I knew beyond doubt
that she was right, and there could be no more waiting. I had to go. And it came to me at the same time, as it never had before, how much she had done for me, and how much I loved her and would miss her.
    She looked at me a while again without speaking, dry-eyed, and then she picked up a dish towel and handed it to me to wipe away my tears.
    â€œListen. Tomorrow morning we’re going down to Hargrave. I’m telling you now so you can think about it and get your mind in order. We’re going to see what we can do.”
    Â 
    My father drove us to Hargrave. Grandmam instructed him to take us to a little grocery store on the main road just where the houses of the town began. He was to leave us there and come back for us at a time Grandmam gave him. She had arranged this, as I didn’t yet understand, because she didn’t want us to be associated with my father’s old car, which looked, as she had often said, like the last of pea time. He of course knew exactly what she was up to, and I remember how he grinned.
    When he had let us out in front of the little store, Grandmam waited for him to drive away, and then she turned to me. She said, “We are going to see an old friend of mine.”
    She looked me over and gave a few improving touches to my dress and hair. I was wearing a navy blue dress with a close-fitting white collar and covered buttons, a very dressy dress, very becoming, that she had given me to graduate in.
    She was wearing her good black Sunday dress and her black hat with the violets, her hair neatly done up. As I had never seen her do before, she was wearing too a pair of small silver earrings and a silver broach that matched. To my surprise, seeing her then in the dignity of her best clothes and the strange newness of that day, I saw that my grandmother, as familiar to me as the path to the barn, was a beautiful woman.
    Both of us were carrying our purses and wearing gloves.
    We didn’t have far