The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘Don’t you think that’s as pretty a calf as ever you see in all your time?’ Ellen turned her heifer into the pasture to let it have its turn at the milk. ‘Mammy says I let her have more’n her share. She’s a caution to eat. Ain’t she plump now! Feel how soft her hide is. She’s no hide-bound starved-out white-trash heifer. Ain’t she got pretty ears now! Look how soft they are, a-reachen out in the air and a-turnen this way and that and up and down, trembly. Feel her horns down under the skin, feel. She don’t know what horns are, and there they are, a-comen on her. I could lift her up at first but I can’t now. Look at her back, how straight it is, and look at her plump little round sides. Feel how soft she is all over, feel.’

  ‘Huh? What I want to be a-feelen of a calf for? Dum, I seen a calf afore in my time. What I want to be a-feelen of a old calf for? Yes, you’re right, you’re right. Hit’s soft enough. Hit’s a fine calf for sure. Hit’s a premium calf at the fair, I’ll lay a dollar hit is. Which you think’d be better land, the Dorsey bottom or some of the Gowan farm? Which you’d rather have? Which you’d rather live on?’

  By that time it was May.

  All the girls had bright summer dresses and presently there were summer hats, some of them trimmed with flowers and some with ribbons. Ellen’s hat had daisies about the crown, and she could feel the flowers softly moving when she walked, making a dry rumbling clatter in her ears, or tossing in a storm when she ran, beating against the hat brim. She saw them in a storm when Jonas or Elmer jerked the hat away and held it high overhead, fending himself from her clamour with feet and arms. The girls liked to try on one another’s hats, borrowing graces from one another for the moment or testing, each, her own charms under the scrutiny of alien ribbons and hat brims. All together they walked along the road toward Gowan’s gate in the Sunday afternoons, or they walked the long way to Fairhope churchyard and rested awhile among the stones, reading the stones. All together, Jonas, Rosie, Eli, Dorine, Sebe, Maggie, Erastus, and Ellen, they would join hands and run down MacMurtrie’s hill, and once Ellen read the fortunes in their palms, giving the boys riches in the form of farms and crops and fine horses, or making this one a lawyer or a doctor as a supreme behest, and giving each boy or girl a long and happy life as his natural desert. Then Dorine brought back her hand, greedy for more, ‘See if you can find out who I am a-goen to marry.’ And Ellen, ‘Ten cents more and I’ll read the other palm for you, Lady, only one dime, ten cents,’ and ran hand in hand with Elmer down the pasture singing, ‘A-walken, a-talken, a-walken goes I,’ and all the troop came after. Sundays were fragrant days, filled from morning until sundown with the bright dress and the flowered hat.

  Ellen went up to the tobacco field, a new field this year, behind the pasture and lying out toward the west and the north, and there she dropped the plants for Henry and John Bradshaw, or hoed the young crop, her mind reaching out over the hills and hollows with a new know ledge of the land, out over the farms and woods and creek bottoms, Squire Dorsey’s and Gowan’s and MacMurtrie’s and those lying further, until she pushed her task quickly and smiled to herself or sang, or lifted her back from its bow over the clods to look at the crows or the plovers or the bees as they flew over, for to them there were no farm lines, and all the land reached out and away as one portion, hills and hollows and sparse woodlands. Elmer and Eli were shearing the sheep in MacMurtrie’s barnlot with Uncle Ben to help and Scott MacMurtrie tying up the fleeces in bundles or crowding them into great hempen sacks. Elmer and Eli would catch the great padded bucks and ewes in their arms and slit the fleece away with great shears and peel back the rich fat wool, turning into the pasture the gaunt fleeced ewes and bucks that wobbled unsteadily on their feet and stared curiously at their own ugly shadows. Then Elmer and Jonas and Sebe and Eli were ploughing the corn, Elmer in the high field on Gowan’s hill and Eli on the rolling slope that edged away from the marsh and spread back in dark undulations to the foot of the wooded hill where the MacMurtries hunted foxes, and Jonas was driving the ploughshare up and down Marion’s corn rows in the far lonely field behind Gulliver’s creek, singing loud as he turned the plough at the corners, hearing his echoes as they called down from the rock-cliff in hollow, further-going blurs of flattened song. Or Dorine gathered berries from the pasture briars and pressed them into a red juice that flowed over her fingers and fell in great red globules into the bowl.

  Erastus found a bee-gum tree and robbed the wild bees of their fruit, carrying home their dark yellow-brown honey, wild smoke-coloured drips, to share it with the rest, a pail of it for Ellen and a pail for Dorine. Maggie and Effie were taking turns with their mother at the loom, weaving the strips of carpet, sitting now one and now another at the great rude loom on the entry porch of the cabin, beating and treading, crossing the warp into its shed and passing the great bobbin from hand to hand, hurrying against the coming of winter to buy for themselves lard and meal. Or Jonas and Elmer were harvesting Wakefield’s wheat, Elmer driving the great red reaper across the field and cutting wide ribbons of grain which fell under the knives and flowed in a stream through the trough to fall in bundles behind in the stubble. Then Jonas would gather the sheaves and stack them in even shocks, with Henry and John Bradshaw helping, and Ellen herself lending a hand one hot afternoon when sullen clouds gathered in the west. Then they raced with the coming storm, making each shock secure but building it with swift skill, Ellen carrying the bundles up for Jonas to stack. He took them from her with merry words and quick hands, his eyes on her laughing eyes and on her moist face, and once, behind two upheld sheaves, he kissed her as they met in the stubble. He laid one hand behind her neck and drew her forward quickly to kiss her mouth.

  Or on Sunday, two and two together, they walked to Fairhope church yard, waiting there for the service to begin. Men would stand about among the carriages, a foot on a hub or on a wheel spoke, spitting the juice from their quids and talking in low offhandish voices, careless seemingly of whether they were heard or not, uncommitted. The women would sit in the semi-dark of the church talking, they too in low tones. Their voices came to the doorway mingled with the strange odours of the pews and the echoes that lay over each sound – crooning voices, falling into rumblings and dying away, brooding voices. They would sit in clusters waiting, and their words, ‘Joce is expecten another.’ … ‘So soon?’ … Quiet voices like the low crooning of birds, such as pigeons in flocks… ‘So soon?’ … ‘This makes six, don’t it?’ … ‘Five only… but five, that’s a houseful… And two dead.’ … Pigeons in flocks crooning. ‘Two dead… So soon!’ … ‘Dell is expecten…’ ‘Dell?’ … ‘They say… She put off a right smart while but I knowed her time’d come.’ … ‘I’m right glad. She’s no different from the rest.’ … ‘No, let her have her hard time like the balance.’ … ‘So soon!’ … ‘Poor Dell, she was taken bad, they say… Miss Min was sent for finally… They say Tom was up all night a-doen for her… But what does a man know?’ … ‘Poor Dell, she’ll see sights afore she’s done… Afore she’s done.’ … Their voices would stop at the doorway. After a while the preacher would come and then those outside would pass within, Elmer, Dorine, Jonas, Maggie, Ellen, and Sebe, sitting in a long line near the rear of the church. They heard the voice of the preacher as it broke and parted among the corners of the room and flattened against the ceiling – Rehoboam and Jeroboam, kings, and the kingdom divided, never again to unite, Rehoboam and Jeroboam, great words striking the wall, great words with jagged fringes of echoes hanging from each syllable, and the lonely kingdoms, divided and apart forever, the great sadness of the lonely kingdoms settling upon them as they sat, Elmer, Dorine, Ellen, Maggie, and even Sebe. Dorine’s dress was of new sweet cloth, bright threads like hair-lines running evenly through the white. Her own dress was fresh and new, her dress, Ellen’s, folded away all week in the box across from her bed, now lying out under her hands, the blue flowers repeating each other over and over on the field of white, small blue flowers, so small that only she and no other knew the c
urve and thread of each design and every faint shading of colour. And as she sat in the church a shy thought came halfway into her mind and she wondered if Jonas knew the flower of her dress a little as she knew it, and if he would know it for hers if he saw it far away from her.

  Dorine was pretty with her thin skin and her damp mouth, and Rosie with her big cheeks and round lips and bright round eyes. Maggie had slim hands with little broken nails and one of her front teeth was smaller than the others. She was pretty, always slow and tired, wanting to rest. Elmer had a grey lock in his black hair and his head cocked on one side when he smoked his cigarette. Sometimes he lisped his words a little; everybody liked him. Eli was big and heavy-necked, deep-chested; swelling sometimes when he talked until he looked like Squire Dorsey. He would lift his head quickly and say, ‘It is not anything of the sort,’ or ‘I do not anything of the kind, now.’ Eyes like little beads swam in his head and he would talk with all the rest while he waited for Rosie, calling out, ‘Come on, Rosie, it’s time we’s off.’ All of them liked Eli. She thought of herself as somebody Jonas liked, as filled with an inner sweetness, thought thus as she went about her tasks and ways, the thought mounting with her as she mounted the stairs and bursting upon her anew as she passed through a door. She would take the turkeys through the small gate and as she passed within the enclosure Jonas’s words gathered into a nucleus and spread wide with the opening out of the grass lot and the dispersing flocks. She heard the work mules crunching their fodder and the deep voice of the mule barn rising firmly among the noises, sharp and firm, gentle, and with it came Jonas’s voice, related to it by its unlikeness and remoteness, close following.

  Moonlight nights and there was church at Fairhope every night with quick singing to stir the breath and make the heart beat faster. All together, Jonas, Elmer, Eli, Rosie, Dorine, Ellen, Sebe, Maggie, they would walk each night along the road, falling into pairs or flowing together, and they would sit together in the church. Once the preacher told of hell and the damned. Then Dorine was frightened and she clung to Ellen’s hand, and when the last song was singing she whispered that she would go up to join if Ellen would, and Ellen, remembering hell, was frightened too, and with Effie and Sebe they went to the front of the church where the crowd was gathered. They walked homeward in pairs and Ellen, remembering hell, was very gentle in her way to Jonas.

  Elmer lisped his words when his speech was approaching laughter and his tongue kissed his upper teeth sweetly in the confusion of his words. He liked Dorine, and he would tell Ellen of his liking, holding back from his wish, curious of it and reticent, swearing Ellen to keep secret all his confidences. In the telling he would live again his scenes with Dorine, wondering over her, over her likes, her ways, her speeches, dwelling on every least inflection of her voice in recounting her sallies. For him, Ellen’s kiss in the game was easy and light, intimate and light, the reflector of summer and of herself in moods of play. It was the frivolous quirk of her dress in the dance, the fleeting pose of a body in momentary attitudes. Her laughter with Elmer was carried from one meeting to the next, always near the surface of their being, and for his leading she stepped wantonly in the quadrille and beat the rhythms with her head and shoulders. Or for Mr Townley, who was identified with his music, her manner was an extension of the ripple of her dress, and when she went dancing down his guitar notes between their eyes passed the flash of all laughter, music and dancing made one in the moment, each chord a thread or a ribbon on which she walked with light feet as she twinkled down the dancing floor. His wife with their many children would be standing along the wall. Dorine on her side would tell the confidences of her liking for Elmer, dwelling on each to relive its significance, so that their two likings and wishes, Elmer’s reticent and unformed, Dorine’s eager, unshy, realised, flowed over her and around her as if she were its musical core. With Elmer she made laughter, each complementing the other, each playing a little with the fountain of his own need. In their kiss the froth of the high tide of summer arose and frayed. It was as if they sang a come-hither-come-hither to all the summer and all the countryside.

  After the first broods were turned away the hens would often wander off to stolen nests for their second settings. Ellen would search for these among the high weeds at the back of the garden or in the old abandoned barn where a quantity of mouldering straw sometimes concealed sly nests. Hens would brood there even though the rats would devour their young as soon as they were out of the nest. If she went near the barn at nightfall Ellen would hear the bats slipping through the air and often she had heard the whippoorwills cry out their songs from the yawning rafters, songs more mournful than all sorrow, as of beings blighted by all loss, repeating with monotonous cry a loss incurred over and over as often as some mocking or futile hand restored, of the endless futility of nests and litters fathered and mothered to be the prey of some other as futile kind. Ellen would go half fearfully into the barn when the sun was bright on the south front. Once in the mid-summer as she came softly out of the old corn room, she met Amanda Cain suddenly in the wide corridor, walking quickly from some inner place. Her hair lay over her forehead in large tumbled curls and was gathered high on her head in a knot, and her mouth twisted from moment to moment in a proud smile, the corners of her mouth, unlike each other, bent, one downward, and then her thin lips shut together closely into a fine thin line. Her bright dress flared quickly in the sunny doorway above the dry dusty floor, and then out into the shade of the locust thicket. A little later Ellen heard her over beyond the fence in the other farm calling pee-o-wee-wee-wee, at first low and broken and then high and insistent. Standing in the barn door, looking down into the half obscurity of the thicket, for a moment Ellen felt the feeling of the other farm and what it would be to be a part of the land beyond the fence. She would be ‘that girl that works on Wakefield’s place’, and ‘that white girl over at Wakefield’s’. Her coarse blue cotton dress hung skimply against her body, a strong body, sturdier than Amanda Cain’s, round breasted and strong shouldered. She saw herself as a creature in a coarse dress and broken shoes that went up and down the farm lifting heavy clods and cutting wood. Amanda Cain’s dress was bright and fine every day and her slippers had bows on the instep.

  She went cautiously into the inner parts of the barn, searching again for hens, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s place’. She saw her strong hand feel into the dark straw, reaching for eggs. Once when she had come here in the early evening, a bright moon shining, come to look for her straying calf, she had seen Scott MacMurtrie going into the doorway and later she had heard low words from within, Amanda Cain’s voice, ‘You took your time to come. You must ’a’ come around by town.’ Now she went slowly from manger to manger, gathering an egg or two, looking half fearfully, for once a snake had fallen from some timber above and had writhed away through the dust at her feet. At the rear of the hallway that gave into the stalls an old feeding frame was raised a few feet from the ground and in this was strewn a bed of straw, hollowed in the middle like a great nest, and drawing toward it cautiously and peering in she knew that it was Amanda Cain’s bed, for the sash from Amanda Cain’s bright dress was strewn across the straw.

  She came away quickly, bringing four eggs in her apron and hurrying through her tasks, going up to the milking pens with Amanda Cain in her mind, and Scott MacMurtrie and Miss Cassie, thinking how Scott and Amanda came to the mouldering old barn, a den of rats and snakes, and how they flirted with the horror of the place and with disclosure to make their evil more sweet. Then Scott would go to the hills with the hounds and Amanda would slip back into the house to sit through the evening with Miss Cassie, sewing a sly seam or reading a page. She walked through the cattle pens knowing this, herself the only one knowing, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s’, or she glanced down at her strong body and remembered Amanda Cain’s slippers with their little bows at the latch. In the milking pen she heard Ben’s croaking words, ‘Miss Cassie, she bought her a mare today, I see Miss Cassie a-riden a new hoss,’
and only the week before Mr Al, standing in the gate, calling back to Mr Dick, ‘Scott and Cass will sign the note,’ or another voice from Miss Tod’s yard, heard over the hedge, ‘Scott and Cassie are a handsome married couple, as handsome as any ever you’ll see. Did you ever see Cassie out a-fox-hunten with Scott? Both the same height on a horse and Cassie not afraid of the devil himself.’

  Coming down from the pens Ellen stared so intently at the herbs along the path that they swam and floated near her eyes. Amanda Cain was a shape lying back in her mind, a sour pain that cut swiftly through her flesh, a sweet evil that lay snugly nested deep in body somewhere, that turned in its secret nest and drew back into a deeper cradle and laughed, bending one corner of its mouth downward. She was a lightning that went crookedly across the sky and lay down to rest in some secret place. She herself, Ellen, was the only one who knew, she thought, and she would never tell any of the farms. All evening her mind would return to Amanda Cain and to the swift step in the barn, and into her secret knowledge came the thought of Amanda Cain bearing a child in the straw of the mouldering feeding frame and hiding the child away there while it lived and grew. Its image would arise unbidden, a phantom, a naked child of no sex, having a slim long face and a mouth that shut into a thin line and hair in a tumble of curls on its forehead. Holding their knowledge, she lay between them, intensely sensible of their way, seeing herself vividly reflected in their common knowing, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s place’, until she shuddered to see herself passing among the fields and pens. The image that haunted the barn would arise unbidden, a child of no sort, running over the decayed floor. It would catch the lizards if they ventured into the doorway and eat away their lank sides, and in the evening after the lamp was lit, hearing the whippoorwill’s call, the lonely quiver and lash of the notes was like a thong, and she would think, ‘Mandy Cain’s brat is a-cryen.’