The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘Here I am!’

  She waited listening.

  ‘I’m Ellen Chesser! I’m here!’

  Her voice went up in the wind out of the ploughed land. For a moment she searched the air with her senses and then she turned back to the stones again.

  ‘You didn’t hear e’er a thing,’ she said under her breath. ‘Did you think you heared something a-callen?’

  Ellen’s room had been papered with a yellow print at some time long past, but in the meanwhile the roof had leaked and the water had run down the walls, which were now stained with brown marks that changed with each rain. When she first gazed at them as she lay in her bed they were monsters depicted in shadows and running lines of brown and clouds of amber. They became demons impaled on trees, on walls, crucified on bars of black and dying lewdly, not decently agonised on their crosses. One spouted a jet of water from a snout that protruded from its armless trunk, laughing with a great jaw. After the next rain a woman in a long shawl came walking through the crosses and a slim hand held up a flower. Another time hands were sinking under tawny water, calling-out hands, but the rains of April smudged all out and began a new story with large bears running after little beings of some sort. Ellen stood turning about in the little room. She had hung her wardrobe on the nails of the east wall, her skirt of black wool, her dark waists, and her nightdress. The cot stood by the south window, through which came the April sun to make a long warm rectangle on the bare floor, and the morning with its hard light searched out every meagreness of the apartment. The window panes were marked with smudges left by the painter’s careless hands long ago, and Ellen had not been able to wash the glass clean and clear. The floor tilted a little toward the south wall. Ellen turned about in the morning glare, bending her neck to look at herself, stepping about to search out the ways of her movements.

  ‘I’m ugly,’ she said, ‘and I might as well know it and remember. My hands are big and coarse and my skin is browned and redded in the wind. My eyes are slow and big, always a-looken at everything in the world and always expecten to see something more. My face looks like the ground and my back looks like ground with my old cloak pulled over it. I’m ugly. My hands, they’re ugly and my feet have got on big old shoes. My feet are like roots of trees. I look like a board and I look like a rough old pond in a pig pasture. I’ll remember. I’m ugly. Ugly. I’m ugly in the way I walk; sometimes a-goen fast and sometimes slow, scared-like. I might as well remember. No need for you to think about something pink to wear or something blue or yellow. No use to think about soft colours. You might as well wear one kind as another. Drab. Brown. Faded dark old shrunk-up anything is good enough. Why don’t you just give up and be ugly? That’s what you are. Ugly. That’s all.’

  She went down the stairs slowly, beaten back upon herself. Out in the pasture she cut dandelions and wild mustard for greens for dinner, searching over the ground and cutting a bit here and there, wild lettuce and lambsquarter and a bit of narrow dock. A great load was gone from her body. She went lightly from place to place to search out the green herbs as they grew among the grass. No matter about her hands or her searching eyes or her heavy-shod feet. They did not have to be any other way. It was pleasant to bound lightly from place to place in cool green stuff and find out tender young green bits to cook for dinner. The sun and the ground and the herbs to eat, the herbs cut and dropped into her basket, to spring from one tuft to another on light-going arms and feet – that was a good way to be.

  The turkeys had been hatched several days when Ben came to the tenant house door one morning with a sack of coarse corn meal and a bunch of red peppers. The flocks had been turned into the pasture that day and Ellen would make bread for them out of the ground corn and a little of the pepper and feed them at noon near the pond. Ben told her that Miss Tod expected her to watch after them from time to time during the day and to bring them to the barn lot just before dark and close them into their coops. All day Ellen remembered, scarcely able to wait until evening when she should become a part of the movement about the large barns and pens, when she would go, she hardly knew where, and do things she could scarcely foretell behind the small red gate. The two barn lots made right angles with each other and in the extreme end of each stood a large barn, one for the cows and one, that on the left, for the horses and mules. As Ellen approached the enclosures from the cabin she passed near the mule barn while the cow barn lay off to the right, and in the corner where the two lots came near together there was a gate leading into a third lot which was used for the calves and turkeys. This was the small red gate through which she would go. The first day the turkey hens were shy of her and it was Ben who enticed them through the gate, the chicks running uneasily after, slinking under their strange crumpled shoulders. Ellen fed them the pepper bread and the corn, lingering near them to cure them of their fright of her. Ben pumped water into the trough for a short while but when Josie came from the house with pails jangling he left this and went to help with the milking. Mr Al came to give an order to John Bradshaw, and then the milk began to flow into the pails with a high thin crying sound that became low and dull as the liquid beat upon the foam, but other high thin cries overtook the low ones as John Bradshaw filled his pail and started another. Mr Dick was working in the horse barns feeding the mules and horses. He would pass across the runway with a great fork of straw on his shoulder. He was large and tall, like Mr Al, his brother, but younger and more neat. ‘Wakefield Brothers, Stock Farm’ was printed on paper. A piece of it had come fluttering down across the pasture one March day and lodged in the cherry brush. Now the hens were afraid of Ellen and she left them to their corn. She stood off by the gate, feeling useless and incompetent and, when no one was looking, she slipped through the gate and went quickly down the hill.

  In a week, however, the strangeness was gone, and when she crumbled pepper bread by the pond at noon the hens came with their speckled broods that cried ‘pee pee pee’. There were five or six hens, each with fifteen or twenty chicks. Ellen’s orders came from Ben who conveyed messages from Miss Tod. ‘Was the old bronze hen a good mother?’ She must be sure to keep the drinking pans clean. Going about her labours Ellen carried pepper bread in her apron pocket and she would give some of this to the chicks whenever she met them. They would flow about her feet like strange water when she walked across the pasture toward the tobacco field.

  Mr Al was large and gentle, moving slowly through his farm, speaking to his stock in a firm gentle voice, deep-sounding out of his broad back and full sides. He spoke gently to Ellen:

  ‘See’t you shut that-there gate always. Them calves mustn’t get out.’

  Ellen could hear the deep echoes of his words flowing through the barns, flattened against the hay, hollowed-out in the corridors, and rolled out in a sheet before the high outer wall. Mr Dick had the same voice, gentle among the mules, firm and wide-flowing.

  ‘Stand up there Buck. Woah there! Get in there Ike!’

  The two voices flowed around her as she crumbed the pepper bread for the little turkeys. The voices were full of deep, gentle, abrupt undercurrents; they went stepping down notes with long steps, as men’s voices go in singing, walking through a tune, walking down a tune to the very bottom of song. Ben’s voice came upon her too, an old voice, full of cracked words that were jointed in the middle, each fragment full of harmonies.

  ‘Take yo’ turn, now, you li’l’ devil, an’ suck yo’ mammy. Dis-here calf’s big ’nough to wean, I’m a-thinken. Get outen dat bucket, Ol’ Black! Always got yo’ nose in somewheres!’

  Once in a while Miss Tod came to the lot. She was a large woman with plump hands that were often full of rings. Sometimes there were stains around the corners of her mouth from the snuff she had taken. ‘I’m right proud of my turkeys this year,’ she said. ‘If you take care the best you can I’ll give you one for a present for your Thanksgiving dinner, besides the pay.’

  Ellen would milk the cow before sundown and carry the milk to the little porch bef
ore the cabin and strain it there. Then she would bathe her face in the wash pan and brush her hair smooth before the kitchen mirror, winding her long braid around her head. In the glass she would see her own clear eyes and brown lashes and she would look at the little pits in the corners of her eyes. If she strained her face upward she could see her neck where there were a few brown freckles, and she could see the little hollow in her throat between two white bones. Sometimes she looked long at her teeth and her lips, searching them out, trying to know all their ways, or she would search out her dimpled smile or stand back to see her smooth cheeks or draw down her dress at the throat to see her white breast and shoulder.

  ‘I’m a-goen now, Mammy,’ she would say. ‘Is it time?’

  ‘I expect it is. You better.’

  She would take the turkey bread in her hand and go, bonnetless, up the gentle hill across the pasture in the light of sundown, calling the hens as she went. She was keenly aware of the ceremony and aware of her figure rising out of the fluttering birds, of all moving together about her. She would hear the mules crunching their fodder as she went past the first barn, and she would hear the swish of falling hay, the thud of a mule hoof on a board, a man’s voice ordering or whistling a tune. She would take the flocks in at the gate, careful not to let any of the calves out, and she would know that John Bradshaw knew that she was there although he said nothing and looked nothing. She would crumble down the bread for each brood near its coop and she would make the count and see to the drinking pans. Then she would go back through the gate, only a wire fence dividing her from the milking group, and walk down the pasture in the dusk. That was all; the office would be over.

  A dim smoky light would shine out from the kitchen where Nellie had placed a supper on the table. Henry was always very tired after his day in the fields, walking slowly and stiffly. Sometimes Nellie was angry because they came in late, but often she was full of talk. She had seen this one or that go by along the farm road, one of the Townleys or O’Shays, people living on the small farms along the river. A wagon had broken down by the pond and spilled a load of hay, everybody running from all sides. The beans were right good seasoned with a scrap of jowl meat. Ellen must make fast that hole in the fence or else the cow would be in with the calf before morning. She was out of soda and salt, and there was not a dusten of meal in the house, and if they expected any more victuals they could fetch her some. Sometimes there was no oil for the lamp, and the gloom would settle over their spirits and over the food. They would fumble their way to bed, dreary sequel to a day spent in the sun and the wind, in the rain or grey mists. But neither the unlit house nor the stumbling on the stairs, nor tired muscles, nor the cruel evenings when there was no salt in the bread and Nellie angry, cruel evenings when the rain crept on the yellowed wall, could take the eagerness out of Ellen’s day or the memory of it out of her night. People knowing her, having her in their thoughts, saying things to her, coupling her acts with their acts – ‘Take the calves in as soon as Ellen gets through.’ The days ran by quickly, mounting higher and higher; she felt herself spreading over the farm. Evening after evening she would go lightly up the stairs with the coming of dark, a little impatient with the night for its interruptions and impatient with her tired body. Or one evening in June when a soft breeze full of earthy freshness spread through the cabin, coming from the south hill where a little marsh lay under willows, tears came to her breast and a strong hand was laid on her vitals. She sat on her cot, too wretched to unrobe herself. The perpetual sadness of youth had flowed upward to engulf her. She was unable to gather her sense of it into a thought.

  ‘Oh, why am I here and what is it all for anyway? What is it is a-beaten down on my breath? I’m a-fallen through the world and there’s no end to the top and no end to the bottom. Mammy a-getten up and a-cooken and a-goen to bed and Pappy works all day, and we have to eat and we have to wear and we have to have fire, and there’s no end to anything.’

  Twilight settled down into the room with diffused shadows and the walls sank out of sight. The nightjars were crying in the sky and a bleat of sheep would come now and then across the half-dark, sadder than she could bear.

  ‘I’m old. I’m so old I’m about done with liven. I can feel how old I am. I’m old and old and old. I’ve been in life a long, long time. Oh, how old I am.’

  A sob stood, a bar, before her flowing mind. She was pushed and shoved up against the barrier. She let her body fall to the bed and lay curled there, too sad to make further preparations to sleep. On and on, without end, she felt herself and all other things going, day and night and day and rain and windy weather, and sun and then rain again, wanting things and then having things and then wanting. Eating and then wanting to eat again, and never any end, and it goes on and on. On and on. And then you’re old. And what did you ever have that was enough? And what was it for anyway? You could never see any end to anything and it goes on and on. Night comes and then it gets to be day, and sheep cry and then they’re still and then they cry again. Voices beat on her memory but they made hollow meaningless noises. Something that came to nothing went on and on. ‘Open the gate, Ellen!’ It was nothing but sound running up and down. What for? What for? On and on. Thus until sleep, the comforter spoke, running gentle hands down her tired nerves and sad thought. ‘It’s no knowen how lovely I am. I’m a-liven. My heart beats on and on and my skin laps around me and my blood runs up and it runs down, shut in me. It’s unknowen how lovely.’

  One evening in August one of the turkey hens failed to bring her brood back to the pasture, and Ellen searched the near-lying fields all through the dusk crying ‘pee, pee, pee,’ and looking into the fence corners. She thought the hen would be sitting with her chickens huddled about her. ‘Some varment will get you-all for certain if you stay out all night,’ she whispered over and over.

  The next morning the hen had not come and Ellen went off across the fields as soon as she had milked the cow and cut the wood for the dinner fire. She looked anxiously through the oat stubble and down the tobacco rows. Beyond the tobacco field lay a stretch of lightly wooded hillside sloping down toward the north, and when this had been searched she came to strange fences and other fields belonging to neighbouring farms. She retraced her way to the tobacco field again, climbing on fences to peer out over the land, but later she went down the wooded hill again, drawn by the strange vistas seen through the trees, framed by the trees, and climbed a stone wall which ran up one side of a cut grain field. It was a clear day with blue sky and wind and a hot sun shining. The wind and the sun were one. The sun flowed in waves over her and throbbed in the mesh of her cotton dress. The sun quivered in waves over the stubble and over the moist pasture. She walked through crab grass and timothy and wild barley, the way leading down a creek toward the north, a little creek that lay against the side of the hill and was crossed at each fencerow by a water gap. She broke a long withe and with this she switched at her ankles as she walked quickly down the creekside. The angles of the hills turned in strange ways and the white stones of a strange creek lay wide in the sun. She began to sing a song she had heard Ben mumbling.

  Oh, little Blue Wing is a pretty thing,

  All dressed out so fine.

  Her hair comes a-tribblen down her back

  And the boys can’t beat her time.

  She went over a water gap where a little willow grew, swaying down into the heart of the willow tree with a sweep of bent branches. Emerged from that she walked on gravel and rank creek grass and frightened the snake doctors away from a still pool as she pranced quickly by.

  ‘Not a-goen anywheres, just a-goen…’ She crossed the creek on a sandy bar, murmuring a little to herself as she went. ‘You’re spiderwort. You’re tansy. I know you. I’m as good as you. I’m no trash. I got no lice on me.’

  A path lay under her feet, a path cattle took to go to the deeper water holes and she saw the little steps of cattle in the pale soil. The beaten ground made walking easy, and when the way swerved away f
rom the creek she followed although it drifted into an upland, an undulation of pasture where strange cattle grazed, black and white beasts lividly spotted. They made vivid colour against the green of the hill and they drifted in the quivering air, raising a head now and then to see her as she passed. She sang loud in the face of the cattle as they stood on their up-sloping pasture.

  Liddy Marget died like it might be today,

  Like it might be today, like it might be today,

  And he saw the bones of a thousand men.

  ‘Saw the bones of a thousand men. Saw with his eyes, that is. I thought till just now when I studied about it he sawed the bones with a saw. Sawed the bones of a thousand men. I saw that-there man there a-sawen with a big saw and bone saw-dust a-siften down. I’m a fool for sure.’

  In the enclosure beyond the pasture of the black-and-white cows she came to a tobacco field, a struggling crop unevenly growing on worn-out soil. She sat on the fence and marvelled at the ill-conditioned plants, jeering at them.

  ‘Gosh, what a crop! Durned if I ever see such runty trash a-growen in a field. What you call yourself nohow? Sallet?’

  She inspected the tobacco for worms, a habitual action, as she passed down a row. Struggling clover grew between the drills and wild grass inched out from the fencerow.