The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘Strongest man I ever see and I’ve travelled a right smart,’ Henry said. ‘I see him lift four ploughshares at once and never lose his wind either. He took a right smart risk too when he married Josie Tinnie. Josie, it was said, hated him afore a year was out and tried to put spite in his victuals, parisgreen it was said, but they lived on together off and on in quarrel and had ten youngones. Well, Wilks he tied Uncle Billy’s hands and tied his feet and made fast a rope around his middle, tried not to hurt old Billy no more’n he could help and he and two more hoisted Uncle Billy down as easy as if he’d been a bale of shingles. Then we all set to and reroofed the house for Aunt Plez, poor old Aunt Plez, and Uncle Billy got so bad they had to send for two doctors and finally the county took him over and he was sent on somewheres, but I see him just afore he went and he was all foam at the mouth and wild in his eyes. That was the last anybody ever see of Uncle Billy in our parts because he died pretty soon after they took him, and Aunt Plez sold out and went to live with her sister. She seen a sight of trouble with her youngones not bright and Uncle Billy the way he was. That was when I was seventeen, I reckon, when Uncle Billy died and Aunt Plez sold out.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Nellie said, turning again in her bed. ‘Can’t you get shed of him in no way or how, Ellen? To blab the enduren night long!’

  ‘A body takes a heap of risks in a lifetime, from first to last,’ Henry said. ‘Next year I was eighteen and then I was nineteen, I recollect. I recollect that was the year Newt got horse-throwed and got his shoulder busted. Saturday it was. A wild critter he traded for, bay I recollect, a critter nobody could gentle, as it turned out. I recall how Newt was throwed a Saturday. Then come Sunday. I recall as well as ’twas yester. Then a Monday. Tuesday. I recollect Wednesday Doc Marks set Newt’s arm bone and Newt he suffered a right smart with a misery in his side. Thursday I recollect, then Friday Newt was up and about and come Sunday he was about near all over it but except his arm and that took a pretty considerable time to knit. Newt said he’d vow he’d ride that critter inside a month but I don’t recollect he had any luck with that-there nag. He traded finally for a light bay colt. That was fall. Then I recollect spring. Yes I recall. Then come fall and warm politics on. I recollect the barbecue on the creek and old man Hardin on the stump for office. Spring then I recall. I went off that spring and lived with old Mr John Lucas that next year. I recollect what heavy crops there was. Prices down to the bottom. Six cents for fair good burley or even four. Bad that was. Then I lived over on Tick Creek a spell. Then I went down in Taylor County and I recollect Minnie, a right puny child, sickly from the start. Then we had Edd and Lue. Bright youngones enough. Then Harp and Corey. I thought I was a Taylor County man for good. All the youngones died. Bad luck Nellie had with her youngones. I recollect Harp. Bright as a new dollar. But I recollect plainest the time Newt was horse-throwed. It comes back in head somehow. I don’t know when I ever think of Newt since a right smart while. I don’t know for sure where Newt lives now. He may be in Taylor and again he may be somewheres else. That’s the story of my life now, and you wanted to hear it. A body takes a heap of risks from first to last. I recollect how mad Newt was when that-there bay busted his shoulder. I recall how Newt cussed when we fetched him home and how he said he’d break that-there critter or he’d be busted wide open. But I don’t recollect he had any luck outen that nag after all. I recall Sunday. Then a Monday. Then a Tuesday and Doc Marks come and set Newt’s arm over. Or was that Wednesday? Seems like it was Tuesday. Again seems like it was maybe a Wednesday. I recollect how Newt groaned and yelled when Doc Marks set his arm over. It must ’a’ been a Monday after all. Seems like Doc Marks wouldn’t let it go till Tuesday. I recollect he didn’t get over to set it right away after Newt was horse-throwed because he was busy with Sookie Harmon and Newt had to wait his turn, but I don’t recollect whe’r he had to wait till Tuesday or a Monday. Some ways it seems like it was Monday and again it seems Tuesday. I’d have to study that out. Seems right enough to call it Monday, and yet I can’t satisfy myself it wasn’t a Tuesday. Monday though I reckon it was. Maybe Newt was throwed a Sunday. Someways that seems correct. Then come a Monday. I don’t know. Tuesday it seems nohow. I ain’t satisfied in my mind it was Tuesday more than Monday…’

  Henry suddenly became full of sleep and he arose abruptly and left the fire. The blaze had fallen away long since and now one hard ember glowed in the midst of the fallen red ashes yielding a faint pink glow. Ellen let the fire lie untended while she gazed sadly at the iridescent ember, and Henry moved about in the dark of the region beyond the bed, making slow sounds of slipping into the bed with the low sigh of the quilts and the creak of the settling slats. Then Jonas moved Henry’s chair back and hitched his own nearer to Ellen’s chair, looking at her with amused eyes, and she arose and laid two sticks on the fire, an ash piece and a piece of sycamore, and they lay darkly together for a few moments to enkindle, which assured Jonas that he would stay longer, answering his questioning movements. The sticks lay together in the bed of the fire for a little and then sprang into first flames, bright, unheated, and new, uncertain, leaping higher and sinking away, but leaping brightly again. Ellen sat in her chair and Jonas drew his chair nearer, and sitting thus they talked a little, caring nothing for what they said but bridging the space Henry had made with his long rememberings.

  ‘Eli thinks he’ll work for old Man Bagby beyond the creek. I see Eli for a talk last night,’ Jonas said.

  Ellen asked something but she did not know how the reply came for she heard only the assurance of a voice that brought her pleasure now whatever it said. The low monotony of the words trailed across the music and spread it widely at the end, and pleasure gathered in her body and in her mind. Now and then the voice flowed forward and her pleasure flowed upon its monotony or its falling away, taking it but not heeding its words unless a question appealed to her for a reply, and then she heard and gave the answer. Then Jonas moved his chair until it stood against hers and he began to touch her face with his fingers and to kiss her and to look at her throat. He put his arm about her shoulder and thus they sat for a long while. A mouse came out of a little round hole beside the chimney and ran over the floor toward the bed, but after a little it ventured toward the fireplace and ate the crumbs of the nut kernels that were dropped, or it rolled as a little oblong ball beside the chairs or stopped beside Ellen’s shoe. It moved slowly about, unafraid, a faint sound of diminutive feet as it came and went. The fire burned brightly now, the sycamore log and the ash, their flames blended into one flame and one light. Far away the hounds bayed, fixed voices, crying at no fox but rather at the night. A sound of hoofs on the road, far away and hollow, the sounds growing uncertain and unrhythmical as the horse came through the pasture gate and then muffled but swift again on the driveway. Mr Dick coming home. Then the barn door swung shut with a heavy hollow clatter and the footsteps were still. Jonas settled his shoulder a little nearer and whispered:

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he said.

  The mouse had run away to hide in the dark beyond the bed, and the fire sank from its brilliance and grew more warmly red as the wood turned to rich embers. Henry breathed noisily in his sleep and Nellie waked no more, her face now turned toward the shadows. Jonas trailed his hand over the outlines of her arm, over her shoulder and over her breast, looking at her with his fingers and with his eyes.

  ‘We’ll get married,’ he said. And then he added, ‘I look for winter to break.’

  ‘I look for spring,’ Ellen said.

  ‘Soon now. Afore you know.’

  ‘The spring birds up in the thicket.’

  ‘But the ground is froze deep.’

  ‘But it’ll come, spring will,’ she said, her hands on his throat and on his shoulder. ‘Thawen time and then spring.’

  The mouse came back and ate the crumbs near the chairs. Ellen’s eyes fell on the little oblong grey ball as it rolled nearer and nearer. Jonas was sitting up with her, tarrying. It was a t
oken. She looked at his hand where it lay over her hand in her lap, the same gaze holding the quiet of the mouse and the quiet of his hand that moved, when it stirred, with the sudden soft motions of the little beast. The roosters crowed from farm to farm in token of midnight and Henry turned in his sleep once again. The fire sank slowly from the hearth but Ellen tended it, adding the last of the wood, a few small sticks of sycamore and ash that had been designed for the morning. She settled them together and they came quickly to life among the rich embers of the former fire, renewing the old fire that had not died. Then the mouse came back from the dark beyond the bed and lingered among the nut shells on the stones.

  ‘I aim to go to town this week,’ Jonas said. ‘What you want me to fetch you from town?’

  ‘What would you fetch me?’ she whispered.

  ‘I’d fetch out anything you took a fancy for if I had to shoot the judge hisself. Anything you fancy.’

  By the renewed light of the fire he looked at her anew. She felt his gaze and his hands searching her for her beauty and she felt her beauty grow more full and rich when he called to it, and it became something which they held and owned together. The last light from the burning sticks shed warmly over her and she shed a rich warmth in her turn, and Jonas buried his face in the glow of her throat, whispering, covering her with his soft words.

  ‘We’ll get married. Some day afore summer. Spring it will be. The thaw is bound to come now.’

  ‘I’ll know when spring comes. The first token. I’ll know,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll get married.’

  Jonas’s horse was stabled in the great barn, snug from the cold. Ben had thrown it a feeding of hay when he passed, and now it was asleep among the other horses, but it would be shy of the strange place and glad when it was in its own stable again. She murmured a few words about the little horse and Jonas replied. Then a wind arose after midnight and rattled the insecure windows and worried the boards of the porch roof, and Jonas drew her nearer and murmured about the wind. The fire faded slowly and the room dimmed. The mouse came back for a long season with the crumbs and the shadows that had lingered beyond the bed drew nearer. It was long past midnight and Jonas whispered that he would go. Three times he arose from their reverie and whispered that he must not stay, that it was time to go, and Ellen acquiesced.

  He would go.

  ‘A night is short,’ he whispered, ‘Sunup would soon come.’

  He would go. He drew away from her and arose, gathering his hat from where it lay on the floor by the door. Ellen moved to the space beyond the hearth and stood in the dim light of the last ember, and he returned once to her there. Then he put on his hat and went swiftly out at the door. She lingered for a little on the stones, kneeling there, forgetting the night, looking into the heart of the coal that throbbed among the hot ashes. Then she covered the fire, using the shovel noiselessly so that Nellie need not be awakened, shovelling the dry grey ashes from the wings of the fireplace and banking them over the living ember that it might be preserved. When she had covered the fire securely she went softly up the stair.

  The cold lingered through the first days of the week, thawing a little in the mid-day but freezing again at night. Ellen moved through these days in a hush of expectancy, finding small tasks, mending a garment or searching out a ribbon, preparing for the thaw and tending the flame of her own beauty. Jonas would go to town at the end of the week and after that he would come again.

  Once she awakened from her reverie and remembered the words of the men who had sat beside Dan O’Shay’s fire and remembered their threat. All the people of all the farms knew, then, of Scott MacMurtrie’s secret, she reflected, and her knowledge of it was no longer a furtive knowledge hidden deeply in her own mind although her mouth was closed dumbly upon it. She thought of all the farms as waiting to see what Miss Cassie would do, watching the house among the cedars, all the other houses turned that way to see, Gowan’s and Wakefield’s and Dorsey’s and Fairhope Church. Miss Cassie would know soon and when she knew there would be a different feel in the air and another way of thinking in the farms. Her own reverie closed about her and she left Miss Cassie out, centring about her ribbon and her bit of lace, her hems and buttons made neat, and, as her reverie grew and became real, the air grew mild and the hold of the frost, at first loosened, became lax and then fell away. The ice would rot away altogether and the earth become pliable, and her reverie grew intense, remembering each moment of the night when Jonas had stayed long with her, distilling each moment of its sweeter fruit. Jonas would come again; there would be another night; it would be as if they had not spent the interval apart.

  Thursday she made new nests for the hens, using fresh straw, and leaning over the drinking pans where the last of the ice was delaying in a pan-shaped mass which she threw out to the sun, she thought of Miss Cassie, quick among her hens. She thought of Miss Cassie’s wide brow and her heavy hair and her eyes, and with the thought a stillness seemed to settle over the air. The chickens came out into the sun and ate their corn, moving quickly as if the winter were forgotten, and later one cackled noisily in the henhouse doorway. It was already spring. Any day she might find the blue flowers and the white ones on the hillside. Within a week perhaps the yellow March lilies would be showing spears of green above the ground in Miss Tod’s garden. She would see them if she looked over the fence from the calf lot. Her bright dress would freshen and Jonas would remember that he had said that it became her well, and his arm about her would lie along the flowers and they would be gathered into her flesh and pressed back into her being. Sitting by the slow afternoon fire her emotion gathered again into a reflection. She had taken his shame and had taken his pang as in part hers to trouble, and she had felt her loss, but it was time now to put it by, to make no matter of it. Jonas would come and they would be as if no interval had ever stood between them, as they had been during their last hour.

  On that night it was that Miss Cassie MacMurtrie hanged herself. Ellen, when she had been asleep but a little while, heard the MacMurtrie farm bell ringing an alarm and in a moment the Gowan hounds began to bay. Henry said that he had better go, that MacMurtrie’s house was probably burning, and Ellen dressed quickly and started away with him, leaving him behind before they reached the sheep pasture beyond the marsh. The bell continued to ring out some terror from the house which stood dark among the dark trees without flame or light except for the one lamp which stood on the doorsill. When Ellen ran up to the door an old negress who had been ringing the bell dropped the rope and limped across the yard, wringing her hands. She told her broken, fearful story, the words gathered into her cries. Miss Cassie was hanging dead up in the upper hall. She had wondered why Miss Cassie did not come to eat her supper and she had warmed the food over and over and once she had called up the back stair. Amanda Cain and Scott MacMurtrie were gone. Then one of the hounds had begun to moan, had gone wandering through the house whimpering and the other hounds in the stable had taken up the cries. Then she had set a light in the hall.

  The night seemed very long to Ellen. The spacious house widely set and high roofed, after her cabin homes, seemed to float in a mythical air. From the moment when she first mounted the great mythical stair, carrying the lamp for Mr Al, all through the time that was spent in trying to revive Miss Cassie, all through the warmer rainy dawn when the chilled rooms were colder than the outside air, she had moved through great spaces, going up and down for Miss Tod, who came at daybreak and set the house in order, or she carried messages from the lame negress to the upper floors or sat stiffly in a chair to answer the questions of the coroner. ‘Hold up your right hand and take the oath,’ he had said, and the large room quivered and the walls receded, the great black bed rolling back into ultra spaces. On the wall there was a picture of Scott MacMurtrie, a young likeness, a stiff coat on his shoulders, a smooth roundness on his cheeks. Scott’s collar and tie hung over the back of a chair. Squire Dorsey came into the room and sat in a chair beside Henry. The coroner was a
large blond man with little red lines on his cheeks, a troubled man. ‘Do you solemnly swear that the evidence you are about to give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?’ he said to her, and she trembled before the solemn words and before the kindness of the voice that uttered them. ‘You can sit down,’ he said, ‘no need to stand.’ She could see Miss Cassie’s dress hanging in the opened closet; Miss Cassie still lay as Henry and Mr Al had first placed her in the hall, covered now with a sheet. ‘Tell all you know of this,’ said the coroner. She had heard the bell, she had run through the dark, running ahead of Henry. The old lame woman had met her in the yard, had limped away from the bell post, Aunt Julie was her name. Aunt Julie had stood outside the house door on the stones before the steps while she went a little way into the hall. She was herself the first one of those outside the household to enter the house, the coroner said, and she acquiesced. When did Henry Chesser and Al Wakefield come? They were just behind her when she stood in the hallway and they went ahead of her up the stair. Did she know anything of the whereabouts of Scott MacMurtrie? When did she see him last? Did she know any reason Cassie MacMurtrie might have for hanging herself?

  She tried to go into the stillness of Miss Cassie for reasons, to probe for reasons, Miss Cassie being everywhere present in the room, in the closet, in the air, in the furniture, everywhere about but still now. Miss Cassie had seen Amanda Cain walking before her with bright looks and a bent mouth, looking backward for two years she had seen, all in one look perhaps. Deceiving Miss Cassie before her eyes for two years, but would that, she asked herself, be the reason for the end of a life? Jonas enveloped her mind stirring in the furthest corners of her being and she could not think why one would quit life. A great will to live surged up in her, including the entire assembly – the coroner, Squire Dorsey, Henry, Miss Tod, Mr Al, all of them. They would all live. She was living. Only life was comprehensible and actual, present. She was herself life. It went with her wherever she went, holding its abode in her being. She was alive, she was alive. The coroner waited for her answer.