The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  Back in the farm there was a stone pit and an old quarry where the walls curved around in an irregular bow and rose to the top of the hill which had been sliced asunder. At the bottom of the wall a pool of water lay, a clear pool with a grey wall and a reach of sky reflected in it. Above the wall a stony pasture went toward the north and broke into crumbling bluffs at the northwest, but below the wall the land rolled down into a sloping field that rounded off to the ends of its confines and melted into the lifting fields of the next farm. Ellen’s cow grazed in the high pasture; she would come slowly down the path beside the quarry each evening walking unevenly on the zigzag way. From the high pasture Ellen could see the Wingate house where the nearest neighbour lived. The rear walls, dull and weathered, stood distantly above the angles of two hills, the stone chimney with its frayed top leaning against a gable end. In one of the dark lower rooms old Mrs Wingate sat all day tearing rags into strips and winding the strings into balls, rocking to and fro as she worked and muttering, ‘He’s got to pay me for my skirt I ruined, nohow… Meat and lard and flour… I lay he held back part. You know calves is a-sellen dear now.’ Ellen had heard the mutterings one day while she waited for someone to answer her rap, but no one came. Inside the opened window an old voice muttered and the dusty odour of rags floated out when the tearing sound came. Another day Ellen had knocked at the door, wanting to know if the woman had three hens she would sell. The mutterings were flowing faster and a mocking old voice was simpering, ‘Better sell the mule colts, better sell… as if I don’t know when to sell my own property… I lay a dollar I’m robbed every day I live, robbed by my own hired help… I ought to charge up for the sweet he wastes. I’ll say “fifty dollars for the victuals you wasted, a-leaven drips on your plate, Jasper Kent,” I’ll say.’ Ellen had come away without making her knocking heard. When she saw the frayed chimney and the weathered roof from the top of the pasture she always thought of the mutterings at the window and the smell of dusty rags. The man, Kent, farmed Mrs Wingate’s land, the two sharing all profits equally. Ellen had seen him go along the road, walking or riding, a tall man, bent a little with his own height as if he stooped to meet the earth, or again she had seen him flinging down the fields – looking at him with her quick glance, as she looked at Pius Donahue or Kate Bannan’s boy. Sitting in the dim room, admitted at last on the mission of hens, she had heard the voice of the mutterings now honeyed with praise. ‘There never was an honester man. “Better sell the mules,” he says only today. I tell you he watches the market close, Jasper Kent does. He’s a hearty eater but he don’t waste, and I love to see a man eat hearty.’ When she had passed out at the door Ellen stayed a moment to hear the mutterings renewed, listening fearfully to her own voice as it was mocked inside the window. ‘Any hens to sell! As if I had a chicken farm. Any hens. “Could you let Mammy have three hens?” I didn’t ask but a quarter apiece. Well, if she comes again she’ll find hens is advanced. Stick-out nose and flat belly, a slut, I’ll lay a dollar on it. “Any hens!” I never could fancy a wall-eyed wench.’ From the summit of the pasture the house would seem turned back upon itself to mutter and whine, the leaning chimney adhering to the end wall. ‘Any hens! A wall-eyed slut! I never could fancy.’ Regina had said that Mrs Wingate was in a lasting quarrel with her son, Albert, because old Wingate when he died left all the property to his wife during her life, and because Albert tried to force his mother to give him a part. He was a great hearty man who stayed in the town roistering and working in turns, or he would come to the farm blustering. The bare old house stood blankly out of the hills and the trees, crouching under its debased chimney, and Ellen walked over the hill pasture looking for her heifer. The spring cold was clear in the sky.

  Ellen and Henry threw the stones into heaps on the hill field and Henry set the plough into the rough soil, making ready for corn. Later there would be a small tobacco crop in the lowest field where the farm tilted away from the stone pit. Henry’s two beasts of burden were a mule and an old mare, its mother. They pulled unevenly together, the mule lagging until the weight dragged on the mare’s tired old sinews. Ellen worked the garden without suggestion from Henry, selling eggs to the peddler and buying from him the garden seeds. The heifer bore a brown and tan calf in March and Ellen felt very calm and secure in her possessions, the two beasts her own. There were hens in the yard and two knotty sows walked about in the pen behind the hen coops to root the small stones out of the mud all day, but toward nightfall Ellen would pour them a mash of sour milk and meal. From the garden which lay beside the house and touched the road she could not see any neighbour’s house nor any neighbour’s field for the land was too poor to induce much clearing and there were many acres of scrubby woodland in which the hogs ran half wild. But up the road that lifted above the toll house and off a mile was the place of the Donahues, and as Ellen thumped at the clods she would think of the houses as they lay on the gentler rises, the Donahue yard pecked bare by geese, the Bannan house close along a road three miles away, a lonely house, always shut and still, or the Whelen cabin toward St Lucy. Out of the upland pastures that were grown with scrub timber would come the slow uncertain crying of cattle bells.

  As she gathered stones from Henry’s ploughing in the high field she could see Regina Donahue at work with Pius in a far upland beyond a wasted ravine. Pius would be moving behind a plough, crawling worm-like along the lines of the corn, and Regina would be moving slowly after him, chopping weeds with a hoe perhaps, although she was too far away for her task to be discovered. Pius had very large round eyes that looked out staringly from behind long brown lashes. His cheeks were round and his lips were large and full and slow. He seemed never to understand what she said to him and he would look at her with still, questioning eyes, beseeching her. She hated his great foolish stare, but she was glad whenever he came to their house door on an errand, glad feeling her hate and contempt lightly flowing. At their house Regina would stump slowly and monotonously over the floor, cooking a supper, never changing her pace as she went up and down putting this or that on the stove to cook. Old Mrs Donahue walked to St Lucy every morning to pray in the church, striding up the road quickly, going to pray for the soul of her husband who was now in purgatory. When she returned from this duty she worked out all morning among the geese and hens. She would cry out: ‘Oh, Regina, come put this clucking hen under the barrel.’ Her words ticked and clucked as she hurried here and there, taking a living out of the hard earth. Once she had said to Ellen: ‘Ask your ma has she got a rooster to spare she wants to swap me. Sure my old rooster is the daddy to all them hens and that’s not good.’ A high flare of the cries of the geese came over her words, the cold raw March and the damp odours of the hen yard. ‘I seen a hard time since Joe Donahue he died on me.’

  Every day or so a woman went by the house door, a thin woman whose skimp dress hung flat against her limbs. She would be carrying a small basket or a tin cup. Ellen, working in the garden or gathering greens along the roadside or sitting with Nellie in the stoop, would talk with the woman when she passed, although the interchange yielded little variety, for her look was vague out of fixed eyes, eyes stony as if they were made of bone. In her, life sank permanently back into the stones. She would lean against the garden fence and wait to be questioned if Ellen worked there among the seeds and the clods, and Ellen liked to give her whatever pleasure she might derive from these repeated dialogues.

  ‘What you got in your cup?’ Ellen would ask.

  ‘Two eggs, I got.’

  ‘Where you a-goen with two eggs?’

  ‘I’m a-goen to the store down at McGill.’

  ‘What all you think to buy with two eggs, now?’

  ‘Chewen wax, that’s what I aim. I taken two there again yester.’

  ‘Do you always buy chewen wax?’

  ‘Might’ near. Sometime I buy stick candy.’

  ‘What you do all day afore noon?’

  ‘I set and waited for the hens to lay. Hit taken the red one a
long time.’

  ‘Bill, that’s my old man,’ she explained.

  ‘Got any youngones?’

  ‘Not e’er a one. I had one and hit died. Hit cried all time and then hit died. Bill said hit was a God’s mercy hit did.’ She spoke without regret, faintly smiling, shaking her cup dreamily.

  The woman would walk slowly off toward the crossroads store which was called McGill. Later in the day she would return and pass up the rocky hill, three miles to go and three to come to get her bit of sweet. Ellen would think often of Fanny B. The spelling class was a game all the children played; two rows of words to learn and you had done enough. Walking home along the river road there would be men wading in the water to seine the fish, wading with their long white naked legs in sight, and Fanny B. would sing out a rhyme or a question. Fanny B. would know what her words meant but she knew in some young way; one could, being young, sing out words one minute and forget all about them the next, even forget whether the things the girls told were true, and forget things one had seen. Fanny B., going to the head of Miss Josie’s spelling class, would look very little and young with her thin arms and legs and her little dark dress, knowing the words Miss Josie asked, knowing only the words that were in the book. That was what it was to be ten years old, all the secret things and the half-known put snugly away in the forgetting parts of the mind, and a fleeting identity with Fanny B., whom she had not remembered for many years, would come to her when she took the key from its hiding place and unlocked her trunk in the white-washed room or when she saw the secret security of the inside of the trunk revealed.

  There was a spring boxed about with timbers across the road from the toll house door. Here Ellen dipped out the water for the house and here a traveller would sometimes stop for a drink. One day in April while Ellen hoed in the garden near the fence Bell Carrier, the woman who walked with the eggs each day to McGill, stopped. She carried the tin cup in her hand, and she waited beside the fence for a short while, looking knowingly from her vessel to Ellen.

  While the questions were being asked and answered a man came down the road from the hill. His feet were bare and his shoes, which were tied together, were hung over his shoulder. When he came opposite Bell he stopped and spoke to her with a slight bow.

  ‘I’d like to borrow the loan of your cup to get me a cup of water from that-there well, ma’am.’

  ‘You’re right welcome,’ Bell said. She took the two eggs out of the cup and laid them carefully on the grass. The man reached for the cup eagerly and held it under the tiny stream that trickled from the rocks at the side of the road. When he had drunk he wiped his mouth on his cuff and looked about him.

  ‘It’s a right warm day for spring,’ he said.

  ‘Hit is a warm day and that I know,’ Bell replied.

  ‘I got a long piece to go against sundown,’ he said further, ‘but if night finds me on the road I’ll stay at Colin Carico’s. Colin will make me welcome at his table and give me a bed, or maybe Pius Edelen will or Terry Yocum. I’m on my way to a place a far piece off from here. Colin is a person of a kind turn now. He’ll give me a bed maybe.’

  Ellen tapped the clods lightly with her hoe to hear the talk more easily, working toward the fence.

  ‘You seem acquainted in these parts right well,’ Bell said. She had put the eggs back into her cup. ‘You seem acquainted like.’

  ‘I go this road once or twice a year and have now for near ten years. I’m on the lookout for a little piece of work that won’t hold me fast, you know. I got to visit my brother over on the Ridge for a spell. I thought I’d make it out to be over there when cherries is ripe. Then I’ll go over to Green and stay a piece with my other brother. I got two brothers. He’ll be mighty proud to see me come walken up to his door some day. I like to make a point to be down there in peach time. Do you know anybody got a little piece of work to do?’

  Bell looked at Ellen with bewildered eyes and Ellen answered.

  ‘Squire Stigall wants somebody enduren the set-out season, I heared Pappy say. He wants a hand the worse kind to help set out and plough.’

  ‘That would be too confinen. I allow to get some light work to make me a dollar or so us I go along, pin money.’

  ‘I’d like, now, a new-laid egg for my supper, wherever I happen on to be or to stay,’ he said, looking away from Bell’s cup, looking away from Bell altogether. ‘I often say there’s not another single one thing like a new-laid egg to strengthen the stomach and make your supper set well, and that’s true too of a man that’s walked more’n fourteen miles since he had a bite. I wonder how much you’d take for one of your eggs, ma’am, or maybe two. I might not reach Colin’s before a late supper.’

  ‘I aim to trade these-here at the store for chewen wax. I’d get five cents worthen.’

  ‘Chewen wax is not a very nourishen food, and when a man’s walked twenty miles in round numbers he craves a trifle of solid food, and Colin might not be at home. Come to think on it I heared a man say a piece back on the road he seen Colin go somewheres this evening about two o’clock. I wouldn’t go to his house to stay and him not there; I’m a decent man, and maybe he might not get back till after supper is all over and put away. Colin’s wife is a fractious woman and when a meal is over it’s over in her way of thinken. She’s not a good looken woman like you and not so even tempered. She’s not got your shiny eyes. Her teeth, now, are not so well-favoured and she herself is not so well-favoured in no way or how and not so well set up.’

  ‘I’d be right glad to give you these-here eggs if you’d be so good as to have ’em.’

  ‘I’m much obliged to you, ma’am. They’re fresh I know.’

  ‘My name’s Bell Carrier,’ Bell said.

  ‘How do you do, ma’am!’

  ‘And who might this other lady be,’ he said, turning toward the garden.

  ‘That’s Ellen Chesser. She’s a Miss.’

  ‘I’m right glad to get acquainted, right glad. My name is J. B. Tarbell. I’m a photographer when I’m at home, but sometimes I follow house-painten.’

  Regina had tired colourless eyes of some dark sort, slightly out of focus. Ellen saw her moving evenly down the yard, taking the angry hen from her mother, saw her going up and down the field, fitting her every act to her monotonous passing. Susie Whelen’s wide mouth broke easily into smiles and her good-natured oaths flowed as easily: ‘Before Hell! I never seen such a boy for kissing as you are, Pius Donahue.’ Martin Stigall lifted his hat when he passed along the road before the church. Sometimes if Bell had no eggs to take to the store she would take two from Nellie’s basket that was hidden under the bed. She would hide them under her apron and slip dreamily out at the door when the talk lagged. ‘Bell taken two eggs,’ Ellen would say, without anger, and the basket remained in the same place. ‘She likes a little sweet,’ Nellie would say. The tower of St Lucy stood up out of the hills, the crosses standing evenly, as fragile as air, stone turned fine and thin. From the hill above the quarry there was only the top of the tower to see, but near at hand the whole tower sloped downward like a delicately formed crystal of stone. Ellen had gone there one Sunday afternoon with Pius and Regina and Susie Whelen. A Dominican in a creamy white gown had come out of the door, his shawl collar blowing up in the wind and his long pair of beads clicking against his skirt as he walked, his shoes seeming large and heavy under the flowing white of his robe. One day, passing the toll house, Jasper Kent turned back and stopped a moment, speaking to Ellen, who was alone on the porch. ‘A little money I wish you would lay by for me. I got no safe place to keep e’er thing.’ She had taken the bills from his hand before she knew what he wished, had let him thrust them into her palm and close her hand over them. The sum, eight dollars, seemed very large as she counted the bills over. She put them into her locked trunk and laid the key safely on its shelf.

  The bell at St Lucy rang often during the day, for the Brothers were always busy, and when it rang they changed from one way of being busy to another. Ellen l
earned to relate the ringing of the bell to the shadows and thus to tell the time. When the mid-morning bell came she must leave the field and start toward the house to help finish the cooking. The late bell of the afternoon belonged with the milking and the time of feeding the hogs and geese and horses. The chickens would be plucking at the littered yard for the last of their corn and the little pigs would be crying at the trough where she had emptied their slop of refuse and bran. She would be carrying the milk pail down to the cow lot, and over the noise would come the sweet slow bell, elegant and tranquil and patient. There was no crowding at a trough in it, no pushing aside and no jealous complaining. It had enough. At the base of the stone tower lay the churchyard which undulated over the hills, the tombs set thickly and unevenly, crookedly about, massed and turned and mingled in confusion, but in the little enclosed yard behind the church and beside the priory, the Brothers that were dead lay in even rows, lying out straight one after another, in order, fenced off from the turning, cluttered graves outside.

  One evening late in May Henry failed to come home from the field. Nellie fretted over the uneaten supper and Ellen worked among the stock. When he had not come at nightfall, Nellie and Ellen went across the farm, calling with uneasy voices, and after a search through the lower field they heard his groan coming weakly from the direction of the quarry. They found him in one of the stone pits, fallen among the stones, and when they lifted him one of his legs fell limp from the thigh. Ellen went to Mrs Donahue’s house for help and Pius was soon hurrying to St Lucy to telephone for a doctor. When Pius returned he brought the Carriers who remained all night. Bill and Pius helped the doctor set the bone and bind in the boards, and Bell sat near the bed for many hours, happy and kind, fervid because she knew someone who had broken a limb. Her blank face turned from the bed to Nellie and back again, but she was apart from the pain, feeling no twinge of it.