‘It’s a sight richer farm,’ Henry said. ‘And croppen on the shares is a sight better contract and I’ll tell you for why…’
‘Well, put some wood on. I’m plumb cold,’ Ellen wailed, drawing closer to the hearth.
‘Move over, Henry, and let Ellen in. Quit a-spreaden so…’
There would be a stairway up to Ellen’s room and there would be a kitchen with a stove, all set up and ready. They would be furnished with a cow. Henry told and retold the details of his contract, wanting praise.
‘But old Mrs Bodine was a right good neighbourwoman,’ Nellie said, ‘a-senden down a bundle of clothes every now and then.’ At her mother’s words Ellen looked down at her skirt, Emphira’s skirt, dark grey wool, torn a little at the hem. The man came for them when they had sat half the morning staring wretchedly into the flames. He turned the team about briskly and backed the wagon near the door.
‘I reckon you-all are ready,’ he said.
They hurried excitedly, tumbling the things out of the house into the wagon. Ellen cried softly as she rolled up her quilts and lapped her clothes into the bundle. She was acutely aware of the little loft room at the moment of leaving it, and she looked about at the brown splintered floor. She knew the knots and marks on the ladder, the shelf in the cubbyhole, the stones of the hearth. She wanted to go; she had talked much of going, of the stairway and the kitchen, of the cow she would milk, of the cream they would have. She wanted to go but her mind clung to its familiar objects. The roll of her things seemed very futile as she laid it on the doorsill, shapeless and burdensome and ugly, herself somehow so identified with it, with what she had, that she wept.
‘Oh, what for?’ she cried softly when she sat among the household goods at the back of the wagon. She saw the last of the yellow lane crying, ‘What for, anyway?’
Nellie and Henry rode on the front seat with the driver and as they rolled away from the lane Ellen watched them sitting huddled and restrained, their heads showing above the upturned chairs. The horses jogged gaily along the road, careless of their light burden, and presently Ellen was aware of the pleasant feel of the sun’s warmth on her shoulders. After a little she noticed the lilt of the horses and she found words on her lips that fitted in with the rhythms they made. Some little birds hopped about on the stone fences dropping little beads of winter song. The few white clouds stood back from the sun and runlets trinkled out of every field, out of every ledge. The green winter mosses along the road were full of life. The horses slopped merrily through the pools that stood along the low-lying bits of road. Something about the wagon jingled, as a loose chain or tire, and this made a gay accompaniment to the clatter of the hoofs and her lips repeated merrier phrases, merry nonsense jargons out of old remembered songs. They went by a little schoolhouse where heads bobbed up at windows to see them pass. She could see her mother and father more plainly now, for something had settled down out of the line of vision. Nellie had the brown scarf drawn about her head and Henry wore a tight old coat pulled up to the chin. Their bodies quivered with the quivering of the wagon-seat and they were talking eagerly, included in a chat with the driver. White and roan shorthorn cattle grazed in an upland field off to the right as the wagon came swaying lightly down on a slope and thundered briefly across a little bridge. When Ellen glanced forward again her mother and father had been looking back at her. They caught her glance and looked again, smiling. Nellie nodded her head comradely and said with her lips, ‘How you a-maken it?’ and Henry touched his hat in salute. ‘How nice we-all are. I didn’t ever know us to be so nice,’ Ellen said when she looked back at the merry hills. A warmth of being beat in her blood and in her breast it spread to a great size. Beyond her chair rose the safe and beyond that her own cot bed, up on end, familiar and gay, all there together, whatever happened, and the sun came down warm and lush. Her roll of bedding lay behind her chair; she could touch it with her hand, the blue cover sticking out from under the brown one and her clothing sticking out a little from the inner part.
They avoided the town, taking turnings and crossroads, and at noon they stopped at a store set in front of valley fields where the roads went off in a Y. The driver and the storekeeper lifted two bales of fence wire into the wagon and tucked them snugly in a little beyond Ellen’s feet.
‘That’ll ride all right, Sissy. No trouble to you at all,’ the storekeeper said. ‘Hit looks like a boey constrictor, but hit’s only fence wire.’ When the old man talked his skin quivered and showed the tobacco stains running in the wrinkles about his mouth.
After they started on again the way was even gayer, for every little while someone was met and there were greetings and salutes exchanged with the driver. ‘The new tenants for Wakefield’s.’ Ellen would catch a phrase now and then from a vehicle passed. She felt herself and all of them become what they were said to be – new and tenants, something for Wakefield, something along with the big quick-stepping horses, along with her mother smiling and Henry waving his hand as if she were somebody else. They were ten miles west of the county seat now; she read the numbers on the mileposts. The road curved gently down among valley farms and crossed a wide creek. They were in a richer and better country, Ellen knew. The driver stopped at a white gate and pulled a long pole that hung out toward the road, and when the gate swung open the horses trotted through, hardly giving Henry time to pull the pole on the other side to close the gate. The Wakefield house stood above on a gentle slope, a large old house of blue-grey weatherboards with tall trees gathered about. The wagon kept in the valley, rounded a hill, put the house on the right, and thus came to a small whitewashed cabin set in a little yard of its own. The rear wall of the large house stood now divided from Ellen by cattle-lots and large white barns and was faint behind tall, close-standing trees.
The tenant house had three rooms, two below stairs and one above – the latter would be Ellen’s bedroom. A narrow staircase passed up from one of the lower rooms, the main room of the house. The other room, the kitchen, stood back a few feet and in the L was a little porch from which wooden steps went down into the yard. Ellen looked at the kitchen stove, walking around it, comprehending its doors and grate. Something like it but different came up in her mind, another smooth dark surface with doors that would open. The house seemed hollow and damp while she stood there, full of silences and voices suddenly speaking out. A broken flatiron lay behind one of the doors, but the room was swept clean. There was a shelf above the stove and another shelf in a corner. She could walk through the door and be standing at once in the larger room beside the fireplace where Henry was fanning a blaze under wood and chips. She could walk back through the door and there was the kitchen again, the front door going out onto the little porch, the back door going down tall steps into a hollow place behind the house where some out-buildings stood. It was very lovely and very strange. The rooms were full of hollowness and sharp sudden noises when anyone spoke.
It was something she remembered. She had been there before, only there was, the other time, a brick floor and there was a tall white cat. A tall white cat came out from under the stove and on the stove a teakettle was boiling. She had been six years old then and she had lived in a house under some nut trees. One day a man went by with his back full of tinware to sell and she could hear all the little cups crying and chiming together when he passed on. ‘What I want with any more tin? I got no money to buy tin,’ a voice said. ‘Take care your fingers, I’m a-goen to shut the door…’ She could remember the strange smell that hung about the nut trees.
Ellen went up the staircase to the room above which was filled with the late afternoon sun and was quite warm. Henry set up her bed in the middle of the floor, telling her she could push it anywhere it best pleased her. Her first night there was strange and sleepless, for a high wind blew. She heard mules running overhead in the wind. Other mules were crying out somewhere over toward the barns and further off a jack was braying. It was far back to Bodine’s. She had slept there only the night before and
she had risen there that morning, but the loft room seemed far, beyond the moss on the road, beyond the bale of wire, beyond the white cat and the tinman, beyond men fishing in a river, wading with long naked legs and drawing in a seine full of fishes with little horns. There were hounds in the air before morning, rushing down through trees full upon the cabin. She could hear the beating of their feet above the pleading of their voices as they passed the door on the trail of the hunted thing.
Ellen milked her cow by the little gate which led from the dooryard to the pasture. In three days she had learned to make the milk flow easily, stroking the animal flesh with deft fingers. The cow was a slim tan Jersey with a bright face and quick horns. Her body was bony and full of knots – bone joints, and her sides were unsymmetrically balanced. She had slender short legs and small sharp feet. She seemed to Ellen to be all paunch, a frame skeleton supporting a subtended belly with buds of milk, a machine to produce milk hung under a bony frame. Ellen looked at her each milking time; she knew the wrinkles on her skin around the eyes and her wrinkled neck, her loud breathing, her corrugated tongue and lips, her moist muzzle, and her pathetic mouth with its drooping lower lip. The tight eyelids seemed scarcely large enough to fit over the large round eyes and the hair spread out from a centre on her forehead, making a star. Her horns were like dark rough pearl and they slanted up over the big skeleton of her face. She moved about very slowly, turning away from the milking place when she had been drained dry, always humble and enslaved, or she walked off across the pastures joining many others at the feeding rick near the stock barns. Ellen saw the men milking in the barn lot, or three or four men and a woman, doing one thing and another, seeming very earnest about the opening of a gate or the hitching of a team. The land rolled out in all directions from Ellen’s milking place. There were rolling hills laid out in fields reaching north and east into a long distance but standing closer and higher in the other points. Through the pasture a farm road ran, unfenced, passing into fields through gates and finally out into MacMurtrie land and then over the west hill. The February white frost lay over the farm in these first mornings and the gentle north hills rolled away like low waves. Day after day Ellen saw the men moving about the farmyards and pens, a negro man – Ben – three white men and one or two women. Some day she might get to know them. They went briskly up and down in the February cold or they stood by gates and called to one another. They might some day call to her; they might be saying quick things to her some day, upward-bending words. For her the people were all folded into one mass which passed and turned, now quick and now slow. The silo tower stood up against the sky. Sound fitted upon sound, never returning, the pageant always flowing.
Henry was pleased with his new place. He went to work early each morning, building fence, clearing new ground on a hillside, making ready his plant bed. He grubbed away roots and chopped out brush, and by the middle of February the smoke went up from his clearing, for he piled brush onto the ground and burnt it for the good of the soil. On other hills near and far away other fires were burning; from the hillside Ellen would see the great flames leap into the air and then smoulder down to a smoke that arose all day. She helped her father clear the plant bed of its stones, and working on this hillside she could see MacMurtrie’s house where it stood toward the south, a dull wall of dark bricks seen through old cedar trees, and she would hear over and over the echoes of Henry’s satisfaction with the new place and of Nellie’s relief, ‘I’m right glad we got shed of Hep Bodine.’ The excitement of the new life kept her aware of all her acts. Each time she passed from door to door on the little porch she saw the low hillrim to the east, a part of the north valley, the white walls of the barns, and the upper planes of the house, grey in the sun but blue in the shade. It was a larger house than Bodine’s, more reserved and more remote.
The farm road lying through the pasture did not come near the cabin but ran in a curve up from the gate at the turnpike, past the pond, and made off toward the upper fields. Men sometimes went along this road on horseback, neighbours from the small farms toward the river. Ellen chopped the wood at the woodpile in the yard and she carried water from an old well in the rear of the pasture. She was afraid to pass beyond the ways allotted to her by her labours, and so the region beyond the pond stood off as a picture, unexplored. The cow would turn away from the other cows and linger down toward the osage shrubs beside the pond, humble, not sure she was wanted, ready to come when Ellen made a little detour to drive her in. Ellen looked forward to the time when the turkeys would be hatched at the barnyard, for she was to have charge of them during the day and see that they came safely home at evening. These duties would take her nearer the barns and the people working there. She might get to know Ben the negro, and John Bradshaw the hand who looked after the mules and horses; she might get to know Josie the yellow girl, even Mr Al Wakefield, or even Miss Tod, his wife. Wonder coloured every act with a haunting sense of its past or its relation to something. In the cabin she would look at the doorways, the knobs, and the latches, at the closet under the stair. She felt a great rush of well-being as she mounted the stairs, a sense of pageantry, and she tried different methods of descent, walking demurely, gliding down stiffly, or tripping down with dancing steps.
When Henry had burned his plant bed he ploughed and hoed the ashes into the soil and made a frame of logs about the whole, a light frame to hold the canvas that would be stretched over the bed when the seeds were sown. There were more stones to gather after the ploughing and these Ellen piled outside the bed. The rocks were dark with mould and moss, for this was a virgin hill. It was a mild March day, cool and clear, with winds worrying the hillside brush and leaping off across the farms in a great rush or beating gently now and then at Ellen’s garments. Henry nailed at the frame while she worked with the stones.
‘No plough iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,’ Henry said.
‘The time of man’, as a saying, fell over and over in Ellen’s mind. The strange men that lived here before our men, a strange race doing things in strange ways, and other men before them, and before again. Strange feet walking on a hillside for some purpose she could never think. Wondering and wondering she laid stones on her altar.
‘Pappy, where do rocks come from?’
‘Why, don’t you know? Rocks grow.’
‘I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen.’
‘I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there’s as many out again. I lay there’ll be a stack to pick up right here again next year.’
‘I can’t seem to think it! Rocks a-growen now! They don’t seem alive. They seem dead-like. Maybe they’ve got another kind of way to be alive.’
‘Maybe they have. All I know is they grow.’
‘Rocks have got shells printed on the sides and some have little snails worked on their edges and some have got little worms-like worked on. But once I found a spider with a dragon beast in a picture on its back. Some rocks, now, are shaped like little silos and some are all marked with little snails and waterbugs and some are open fans and some have little scallops on the edges. Rocks grow in ways that are right pretty now. It’s a wonder, really.’
‘I wish I could see a rock grow,’ she said again. ‘I can’t think how it is. You could watch a rock for a whole year and you’d never see any sign of it growen. The rock doorstep over at Bodine’s didn’t grow e’er bit all the time we lived there.’
‘Maybe it did and you couldn’t see.’
‘It might maybe be they don’t grow if you watch, like fish don’t bite if you make a noise.’
‘I don’t expect, now I come to study about it, I don’t expect rocks out like that grow. It’s rocks in fields that grow, if you ever noticed.’
‘Maybe they take soil, like everything else, but it’s a strange wonder nohow. Like ants now, and like where wind comes from, like horse-hairs that turn to snakes, or like warts th
at go away and you never know when.’
‘I heared a man say once that the sun was made outen fish oil. He said when fishes die they float on the top of the water and the air dries up the oil and it draws up to the sun. Up in the sun it burns and that’s what makes the heat and light. I heared a man say that. I don’t know whe’r he was a learned man or not.’
‘Well,’ Ellen said. And again, ‘Well, some people sleep on beds but some sleep on the ground and some sleep on the floor and some sleep in wagons. I’ve heared it said sailors sleep in hammocks. The people on the other side of the world might, maybe, sleep some other way we can’t think. It might be that way with the sun for all we know. It might be fish oil like that man said and again it might be some other kind. I wish I knowed for sure.’
She was working alone on the hillside. Henry had gone for the seeds and was long in returning. She gathered stones from the ploughed soil and piled them in her neat mound, and the wind continued to blow off the hilltop. She found spotted ladybugs hidden under the leaves and the twigs; they shone out like jewels in the brown and black of the earth. Far away toward MacMurtrie’s cedar trees doves were crying, and over the ploughed field plovers went circling, singing on the wing. To the north-east the hills rolled away so far that sight gave out, and still they went, fading down into blue hazes and myths of faint trees; delicate trees stood finer than hair lines on a far mythical hill. She piled stone after stone on the mound, carrying each across crumbled earth that the plough and the hoe had harried. The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, ‘in the time of man’. The wind lapped through the sky, swirling lightly now, and again dashing straight down from the sun. She was leaning over the clods to gather a stone, her shadow making an arched shape on the ground. All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted:
The Time of Man Page 7
