The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  Then the space about the corners of her lips drew tight. She would wear the hat. Her eyes were hard and waves of strength passed along her spine. She would go on purpose to look at Sallie Lou, to look at her close and find out her way and find out where she was pretty. She would look at her. She would stare her in the face and the look would ask, ‘Let’s see your beauty, then, where is it?’

  But no, she thought, the bonnet would be better. It would be that she had just happened to come on her way from the store; then she could look at Sallie Lou without her knowing. She would throw off the bonnet carelessly and say, ‘Kelly is a-given only fourteen cents for eggs. Did you ever hear tell of such! I taken a dozen and eight over for Mammy.’

  She went to the barns and asked Ben for a horse to ride and he fitted a side-saddle onto one of the unused work horses. Down at the gate her mother waited with the eggs in a basket.

  ‘Trade for anything you think we need,’ Nellie said, ‘or get yourself a ribbon or a pretty. Anything you please.’

  She found it difficult to make her journey seem casual, for the Seay house was three miles from Wakefield’s place. It was not easy to make it seem casual even to herself as she rode across the farms and came to the small yellow house in the midst of fields. Sallie Lou came out of the house to make her welcome, and then Mrs Seay came, Sally Lou’s aunt. Ellen had once met the aunt at Dorine’s.

  ‘Invite Ellen in,’ she kept saying.

  ‘I’ll just sit out here,’ Ellen contended. ‘I got but a minute to stay. I dropped in a-comen from Kelly’s where I taken a little mess of eggs for Mammy.’

  ‘I’d a heap rather you’d come in the house,’ Mrs Seay fretted. ‘It seems more as if you’d come to see a body if you come in and set awhile.’

  ‘I’ll stay out here. I only dropped in.’

  Ellen felt very cool and unafraid. The presence of others set her passion a long way off behind cool banks of intercourse, cool reserves of decision. Sallie Lou was sewing on a new dress for herself, a flowered muslin, and she brought her seams out into the yard and sewed while she talked with her guest. A little boy brought chairs from the house, a fair little boy of about seven years. He was called Hank. Ellen watched Sallie Lou’s hands as they pushed slowly across the flowered print stuff, the right hand beating a rhythm up and down with the needle, the left hand holding the cloth firm and making the rhythm of the cloth meet that of the other hand. The hands were short and puffed at the knuckles but the skin was moist and white, and there was a small gold ring on one finger, the same ring Ellen remembered. Sallie Lou talked quickly, changing from one thing to another as anyone led her, letting a matter go without caring, because she was happy. As well talk of one thing as another, whatever you like. Her eyes would take on quick lights that were like little stars in their corners. There were so many places to go in summer, she said, that she was glad to have another organdie dress, even if the season were late. Jonas was going to get a new buggy. He needed it. A boy could hardly get along without a buggy; there were so many places to go.

  ‘We aim to go to the Glen to the picnic Saturday. He said he’d aim to go.’

  ‘Yes, but he won’t take you,’ Hank said. He tickled her ear with grass.

  ‘He will. He’d better.’ Her eyes turned in upon some inner memory and her face became hard. The next moment she laughed and her mouth was square at the corners and her lips peeled back until there showed the soft inner lining of red moist skin. Then she talked again of the new dress and of how it was to be made.

  ‘You could have one too,’ Sallie Lou said. ‘They have a plenty more at the store, some in pink and some in green. A pink would become Ellen, now, wouldn’t it? The same flower, only pink. It’s a-sellen out cheap this week. I’ll give you a little sample and you can get one offen it, or some other colour, if you like.’

  Ellen tucked the sample of Sallie Lou’s dress in her bosom. Then she said:

  ‘There used to be a boy named Tim around. Where’s he gone nohow? I haven’t laid eyes on him for a long spell.’

  ‘Tim McNeal? I don’t know. He went off. He went off last year.’

  Hank began to tease again. ‘Aye, Jonas! Mrs Jonas Prather, that-there is. Mrs Jonas is to have a new flowered dress to wear to a shin-dig a Saturday over to the Glen. It’d tickle me plumb stiff if he forgot to take you and went off by his own self.’

  Sallie Lou would look up quickly and her face would change from hard anger that gathered in the eyes to the half-smile of the squared mouth where the inner softness of flesh quivered in and out of view. Ellen looked at her unhindered, watching through all Hank’s teasing. She saw Sallie Lou’s anger and how it ran out toward Jonas, holding him, offering, taking, tightening. Tim had gone off. ‘Don’t you dare go,’ her anger said. Ellen could feel this force run in upon herself. She felt Sallie Lou winding through her body and calling to her. In another moment she knew what it would be to kiss Sallie Lou’s mouth and what it would be to want to kiss there. She felt near to Jonas on the instant, nearer than she had been for many months. She felt herself merge with Jonas. It was somehow true and necessary that Sallie Lou should hold Jonas for the moment, and she herself was forgotten. A long while passed while she sat invisible, her breath scarcely moving in her throat. But finally she remembered, conscious of her own confusion again.

  ‘I must be a-goen,’ she said. ‘I’m right obliged to you all. I was right glad to drop down to rest a spell. It was hot a-riden up the branch. I thought this-here way would be a little nearer, but I believe it’s every bit as far as the pike. You come.’

  She played a moment with Hank, who had been shy of her at first. Then Mrs Seay told the child to ride down to the pike with Ellen so that she would not have to dismount to open the gates, and this proposal pleased him very much. A hush had come to Ellen’s breast. On the horse they talked eagerly as they went down across the stubble field, and at the last gate the child had not finished singing his song.

  If I had a needle and a thread,

  I’ll tell you what I’d do,

  I’d sew my truelove to my side,

  And down the river I’d go, dog-gone!

  Ellen waited while he climbed out on the gate to finish it. His eyes were clear and his way had the frankness of a bird singing, so that he merged with every other beautiful object she had ever known, and she almost wept to see him.

  ‘Could you sing me a song, Ellen Chesser?’ he called from the gate.

  ‘Sometime I will, Hank Seay.’

  ‘Could you sing now, Ellen Chesser?’

  ‘Sometime, Hank Seay.’

  She rode away down the highroad, leaving the child sitting on the gate. At every few paces of her progress he would shout a goodbye and she would answer, sometimes waving her hand.

  ‘Goodbye, Ellen Chesser!’

  ‘Goodbye, Hank Seay!’

  ‘Come back again, Ellen Chesser.’

  ‘I will, Hank Seay.’

  She passed over a little rise in the road and then down beyond his sight, answering his last calls.

  ‘I like you, Ellen Chesser.’

  ‘So do I like you, Hank Seay.’

  After that the old horse continued to take the road in his own way and the midsummer roadside growth swam slowly before Ellen’s eyes. She began to weep. She took the sample of flowered cloth from her bosom and, without looking at it, let it drift from her fingers and fall wherever it would. With a passionless gesture she put it away from her. A dull nausea spread through her body and a sense of impending duty, a sorrow not yet realised. The fireflies made dull streaks of light beyond the water of her tears, scarcely seen. The cows would not be milked, her cows, until she came, unless Ben milked them for her, but when she thought of this, dwelling upon it, she was sure that Ben would milk for her, and Nellie would take home the turkeys. She passed the empty house where Dorine once had lived; the yard was now grown with weeds and the fences falling. Her eyes slid from one white stone to another as she passed on the road, and she found that
she had been searching for the difference between Sallie Lou and herself, had been feeling the difference, whatever it was, feeling it in a mass and trying to resolve it into some clear statement. She looked at the difference with deeply penetrating thought, probing the mass and trying to bring it to some precise maxim, to resolve it to angles or edges, but it turned about, elusive and undefined. Sallie Lou held life lightly and held herself lightly, letting any winds blow over her, but over this came a picture of a cavern surrounded by quivering blood and moving flesh that peeled back until one saw its red inner part, Sallie Lou’s mouth. But these ideas faded and she was left again with the fog to penetrate. Sallie Lou was insolent and careless because she was happy, she thought, and then an image of her in a bright muslin dress, in numberless successions of bright dresses, Sallie Lou moving up and down in the dance, but she herself had moved lightly in dancing before Jonas had said he could not dance again; and she had been able to draw great tenderness to Jonas’s face with one appealing glance, asking for it. Jonas liked Sallie Lou because she had not seen him in the first hours of his suffering, she summarised at last. She seemed paralysed, incompetent to assume her grief in its whole. As she turned into the pasture at the gate she knew that she would be going here and there with Sebe until Jonas came back. She would ask Nellie to let her have another bright dress, she decided, and her mind set itself to contrive the dress, deciding, even while it busied itself elsewhere. All evening her voice trailed away, breaking its sentences and leaving the last of them unsaid, so great was her preoccupation with her confusion. She would somehow find a way to bring back the old relation, she thought for comfort; this was a shadow. It was a sickness, a great pain, but it would surely go. Jonas would remember.

  Riding with Sebe along the roads she would but half listen with dull ears to his speculations and plans, his farm wisdom, or she would awake from her reverie and offer lively oppositions to his scheme for feeding hens or his ideas of crop rotation. At the Turpin house she had a gay laugh.

  Maggie had scarcely ever been seen speaking to Erastus, but together they carried an unspoken understanding, and one morning she went to live with the O’Shays, having married Erastus in Squire Dorsey’s sitting-room. She gathered a few things into her arms and walked up the lane with him one morning toward noon, hurrying to be in time to help old Nannie cook the dinner. Ellen let Effie teach her to run the loom and she spent many of her free hours weaving the great coarse cloth, rag woof and heavy cotton warp, making a carpet for Mrs Turpin to sell. It would bring twenty cents a yard; some farmer would buy it to lay on his family-room floor, and heavy boots would walk over it and spurs, perhaps, catch in the mesh. Children would crawl over it and spit their excrements on it, or creeping over it they would trace out the fine red line that now and then appeared in its pattern, running their little white forefingers along the thread and looking at the bright line with solemn, curious eyes. She would wonder if Jonas would ever walk on the carpet, if his eyes would ever happen to see the blue strip she was even then drawing through the shed, and she would weave strand after strand lost in contemplation and pain. One morning as the web grew the conviction grew in her mind that she would not give up Jonas. It would be in the end that she had not meekly acquiesced. She would find a way to search him out; and let Sallie Lou look out for herself. She would find a way to search him out and she would appear before him saying, ‘Why, Jonas!’ He would be working in the August tobacco at Barnet’s place, far down the river past Goodlet’s, past the bridge; she vaguely knew the place. She would find him where he walked along the rows in the tall tobacco, pulling a sucker here or breaking out a top there, and she would take off her hat and let the sun come down upon the shining coils of her hair. He had never seen the blue ribbon about her throat. Then she would say in surprise, ‘Why, Jonas!’ or she would say ‘What’s the use a-joken any longer? Ain’t you been a-playen long enough?’ and she would gather his head to her breast and he would be kissing her mouth.

  She arose from the loom and slipped away from the house, walking down the shaded river road quickly, her mind set upon reaching the place before noon. An old man in a wagon gave her a ride for three miles or more, and then she asked him to let her down, for she wanted to come to Barnet’s place in her own way. The road lifted up from the river and ran along a low ridge where the stones were hot in the open sun, and many turnings were passed, the road running mile after mile, further than she had known. ‘Whose land is this-here?’ she would ask a passing woman or a child, but none ever said ‘Barnet’s’. ‘Is it a far piece to Barnet’s?’ she would ask again, and the answers would vary, ‘Nigh three mile, I’d judge,’ or ‘Every lick of four mile yet, I calculate,’ or sometimes one would say, ‘Just a little piece on, around a couple of turns and down a hill.’ ‘Is there a boy named Jonas Prather that works at Barnet’s place?’ she asked, and the answer, ‘There is for a fact. I see him in the patch as I passed along, field back from the road behind a hay field. This very day it was, I believe, I see Prather.’ But later when she asked how far the answer came, ‘A right smart distance yet, better’n three mile, but there’s a shortcut across by the dirt road. You go on a mile, say, and then off to the right and it’s no piece at all.’ She passed road-menders who were hauling crushed stone and forking it into place along the pike. They looked at her from over their shovels and forks as she passed but she asked them no questions. When they were out of sight she followed the road as it curved down into a cool thicket and there she bathed her face and hands in a little runlet that trickled over green moss, for she must be cool and sweet; the way was not far now to go. Beyond the shade of the thicket the dirt road appeared, and, following it, she wound down a hill into a stony flat where a great waste of washed-out land lay, white and brittle and salty in the hot sun of the mid-afternoon. A small house sat near the roadside, and as she approached it an old woman who was barefoot came to the door and looked stiffly out. Her grizzled hair hung in a short braid over her shoulder and her red swollen feet stood squarely below her dingy dress. When Ellen came opposite the door she stopped in the road and spoke, saying timidly, ‘Good evening, ma’am.’

  ‘Good evening,’ the woman said, and the tone of the greeting added, ‘And what do you want now?’ to her words.

  ‘Would this road take a body to Barnet’s place?’

  ‘It would and again it wouldn’t. What you want at Barnet’s?’

  ‘I want to see a party on Barnet’s.’

  ‘Would it be the young man, maybe, the tall young man with the brown filly for his nag?’

  ‘Could I have a cup of water if it’s not too much trouble to you?’ Ellen asked.

  Inside the house she drank from a dim can a sweetish water that was heavy and warm. ‘If you want fresh you could go to the spring and help yourself,’ the woman said, taking the cup away. ‘I got no call to be a-carryen water for big healthy trollops. Have you had bad luck with your sweethearten?’

  Ellen thanked the woman for the water and said that she must hurry on.

  ‘If it’s bad luck that’s your worry I can mix a charm to bring your young man to your way right off, and he’ll court you and nobody else. It’s a powder to slip in his drink, water, coffee, anything. A dollar is what the price is. It’s a sure charm, never fails. A dollar. Give me your dollar, now, and I’ll give it in your hand right off.’

  ‘I don’t want no powder. I got no dollar.’

  ‘It’s a charm I make. For white gals I make it one way and for black wenches I make it another. I couldn’t tell you how I mix it, not for money, no. All you do is sprinkle it in his drink. I’ll let you have the charm for fifty cents. Just give me the money, four bits is all.’

  ‘I don’t want no charm.’

  ‘Get out the money and I’ll mix up the charm for a quarter. A quarter is all I ask from you. I see you’re a poor sort and I’ve taken a downright fancy to you. Or maybe it’s some other kind you want. I can tell.’ She drew near and whispered a rough old throaty whisper, her
head forward, ‘Say, honey, I can mix something will help you out if it ain’t gone far. A quarter I ask for them powders, same price for both.’

  ‘I don’t want no powders. Is this-here a short way through to Barnet’s place?’

  ‘It might be. Is it some of the men there you aim to see, Prather maybe? He goes this road every day. You better let me get up the powders. Say, I’ll give you both kinds for the quarter.’

  ‘Where would he be now, so late in the day? Would he go by here afore night, do you reckon?’

  ‘Or maybe you’d like to have your fortune told. I can tell your fortune in no time, your true fortune, right outen your hand, and part of it outen the Bible with a door key, for ten cents. Or I’ll tell you what; I’ll tell your fortune and give you both powders, all for the quarter’s worth. I took a liken to you from the start. All for one quarter.’

  Ellen went toward the door, wanting to go but held by the voice which had spoken of Jonas, by the fact that Jonas passed that door and had perhaps spoken to the woman within a day. She shook her head to the woman’s bargaining and moved toward the door, hesitating.

  ‘Gals is queer,’ the woman said. ‘Do you know a gal named Sallie Brown?’

  ‘Sallie Lou? I know her.’

  ‘Sallie comes here. She set in that-there very chair a many a time. I told her fortune yester. Umm-m, you ought to see what’s in her hand! I says, when I see in her hand, “There’s a pretty gal that’s got bright glossy hair all done up high and a blue ribbon around her neck. She’ll beat your time,” I says. I says, “You got no show, Sallie Brown.” Listen, I’ll sell them powders, two kinds, for a quarter.’

  Ellen shook her head.

  ‘Don’t be so all-fired easy to give up. She’s not pretty like you. Catfish mouth, she’s got. Her hair ain’t near so dark and her style ain’t so handsome. A skinny little thing, runt-like. Buy the charm offen me and you’ll never be sorry. A quarter is all.’