The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘The other place, Frankfort, is bigger,’ Jasper said. ‘A wall around it, they say. Striped clothes. I knowed a man got in trouble over a horse and got sent up for three year. His own horse got its foot hung in a bridge that ought to ’a’ been mended. It was the road overseer’s fault the bridge was in a bad fix, or the magistrate’s, one. Nohow his horse had to be killed. Then along came a stray that hung around a week and no owner, and he, the man that lost his horse in the bad bridge, he took the stray to pay himself back for the filly he lost. He said it was the magistrate’s fault the bridge was all busted. The court gave him three year. A wall all around, he said. Striped clothes and you sleep in a cage made outen iron. Grey clothes after a while if you behave. He said he didn’t mind so much after he got over the first, but right at first he thought he’d go outen his head, he said. I took notice that people never forgot he’d been there. Good careful man, after he got back – when I knowed the man – but I see people always remember. He said the man in the next cage to his’n killed his wife away back, fifteen or twenty year back. Was in for life. Said the man wouldn’t talk about what he done. Said he was gentle as a lamb; looked like he wouldn’t harm a flea, but it was true he’d killed her.’

  The road fell away toward the left, dipping into a valley, and the wheels of the wagon made a steady iron clatter on the gravel and the stones, and she thought of herself in the vague being she had formerly held, seen going through dim settled routines, going to the field, gathering in the hens, caring if there were four eggs or six in the nests. The old being rose woodenly in the morning and went evenly about through a set day, morning and night, heat and cold, going out and coming in, but this was now seen but dimly as something surpassed and rejected, and she gathered into a great mass that looked cunningly inward and spread outward in a vast determination: she would defend Jasper from every harm. A man had killed his wife long ago, and now he seemed scarcely to remember it, as if he had never done the thing, for one went out of one life into another and the old life fell away. They moved along the road as it unwound to meet them, projecting themselves through rolling fields, and she entered the land far in advance of her recognition of its way, on the forefront of their going, but the land became real as it stretched out beside them and behind their wheels. She would defend Jasper. It was for this that she penetrated a strange land, for this her great strength arose and renewed itself at each instant.

  They had eaten the sugar bread and night had come. The wagon moved slowly along in the unreality of the dark between faint rows of fence and trees, or it droned out upon a free upland or sank into cool hollows. Ellen knew the steps of the horses, the roan one from the black, and Jasper was a warmth beside her, gathering into a kindness that broke into endearments or rested in quiet. Or they left the highway and went unevenly through a lane and over a farm way, and Jasper walked ahead in the dark to lead the horses. Then she left the wagon and waited in the dark while Jasper said a few words to the driver and sent him back on his way.

  They were inside the house, lighting a dim lamp that sat on a table. There were four things to be seen in the dim light of the lamp, a bed, a chair, a stove, and a table, but each moment of the room stood out sharp and intense. The man who owned the farm had promised to build another room to the house before spring, and Jasper took her to the door and pointed out the fields as they lay stretched forth in the dark, invisible, the tobacco barn on the hill, unseen, the way to the spring, the path to the stables, the silo, the thicket, all dark. Jasper built a fire in the stove and brought food to cook and cool water from the spring, walking quickly back and forth. He had bought some cups and plates at the store. They worked hurriedly to catch up with their own swift life and to overtake the intense moments that stood out luminously between the walls of the cabin. She put the flour into the tray and sifted it with the soda and the salt, or she stirred in the sour milk with her fingers and shaped the dough, or Jasper held her close to his body, and she felt the wide limits of her dream reach far into the dark to take up the fields, the silo, the barns, the spring, and the path.

  The days were hazy with smoke-filled air and the mornings cold with frost. Jasper worked at the barns where the tobacco was housed or he ploughed the land for rye and wheat, and when the food was cooked Ellen would stand in the door of the house to watch for him until he would gather into the path and come nearer, at first a spot moving in the path, a moving shape, a coming voice, and her beauty would grow with his coming until it would meet him full-blown as he stepped through the door; or two women would come to sit a short while through the afternoon, Hester and Marthy Shuck. Their talk would fall idly across the cool hours of the December days, purposeless but gathering weight and intent as it filled the time until Jasper came and as it filled the space about her with an idle neighbourly kindness, and she thought often in the intervals of their talk, hearing some unfamiliar name spoken, that she would name her child Melissy. She made a little dress for it in the secret and quiet hours of the mid-morning, hiding the dress away in the trunk when she heard the women coming on the path. The farmer paid Jasper his wages every Saturday and with the money they bought their supplies at the store at the road crossing, two miles away, down the path to the barns and then out onto the highroad. They would walk there in the dusk and whisper at the counter over the spending of a coin; was there lard? was there soap in plenty? was there oil? or she would ask for a bit of flannel, two yards perhaps, or a bit of white print, whispering her want to the merchant, ‘A little something I needed,’ she would say to Jasper, ‘A small something I wanted for myself.’ But he knew at last why she bought these small bits of cloth and gave her five dollars into her hand, knew as they leaned together at the counter, and gave her five of the dollars although there was little left. They carried the packages home through the raw air of the early evening and cooked themselves a generous supper to reward their happiness.

  Sometimes Bill Shuck and Marthy, his wife, would come to sit through the evening, Marthy a little sly, leading one to tell more than one had meant by undervaluing her own and bidding for sympathy. When they came the little house would seem about to split apart with their songs, Jasper’s great voice playing over Bill’s in a tussle of singing, a wrestle of rough-handled words and great thundering embellishments that grappled down in the bass notes and went scuffling off into their rumbling trebles, or Ellen and Marthy would sing and their song would come like a small plaintive crying after that of the men. The farmer said that he did not intend to build another room to the house; lumber was too high and work too dear; they could make out with what they had and if they did not like it they could go where they could do better. He cried out this decision in the stripping room one day where Jasper worked with the other men.

  Then a letter came to their letterbox that cut into the inner fibre of Ellen’s new life and made it more intense with purpose. She carried the letter across the field to Jasper where he worked at the fences and they read it together in the crisp cold. It was a summons from Squire Stigall for Jasper to appear before his court to be questioned in an incendiary investigation. Ellen put the white cloth she had been sewing deep in the trunk and they pondered the letter together even while their work lay apart, while Jasper mended the fences and she prepared their food in the cabin, or they pondered it while they slept or while they sat through the short evenings. The farmer came down to the cabin one morning angry over the straying of a pig which had escaped through a vent in the fence. He came without ceremony, thumping with his whip on the wall of the house, not troubling to knock at the door. The angry blow had seemed of a strength fit to burst the thin wall, and Ellen went out of the house to listen to his anger over the broken fence which he thought Jasper should have discovered. Ellen told him that Jasper’s work lay on the distant side of the farm, a fact which he knew quite well, told him mildly because of her remoteness from his anger and because of the deep-running currents of her life which held him in but very little place. She folded her hands under her arms
to warm them as she stood, indifferent, beside the small doorway. She looked at the blue of the sky or she let her gaze flow swiftly down the long path Jasper would take in coming, her look speeding swiftly to the end of it where it fell away among the barns. She felt the vigour of her being as she stood in the sharp cold of the morning where all tender living things were withered, herself in her richness and vigour the most living thing in the whole sight, her skin kindled by the cold, her eyes bright, the child within her hidden yet but alive, her throat, her step, her standing figure even and firm. She listened to the farmer’s waning annoyance as he straightened the wires of the fence and laced in the pickets. She found two missing boards thrown aside among the brush and these she brought while he worked at the gap which he closed finally in easy good humour, eager to talk and to make a joke of the mishap, and his smile was intimate and kindly as if the broken fence were a bit of a secret they held together. He was middle-aged and full of life in his own kind, his hand firm on the fencewires, his face pink under his half-shaven scattered beard. Then he looked at the little house from all sides and said that he had laid off to build another room but that work was always pressing in another quarter, and she pointed out the spot where she and Jasper would like the addition built, and life ran higher and fuller in his being and poured out in a desire to assist life.

  ‘You must have that room,’ he said. ‘You just point-blank need it, I know quite well.’

  Bill Shuck’s sister, Hester Shuck, came and went from time to time, a black-eyed girl with wide shoulders and deep hips, drowsy-eyed and quick to laugh. She was free to come and go, uncommitted. Sometimes she stayed with Bill and Marthy for many weeks, or then she would go and work for some farmer’s wife in hog-killing season or harvest time. She would ask Ellen questions of Jasper or of herself, questions that were their own answers, or she would have obscene stories to tell. Ellen kept her secret sewing locked in the trunk, safe from Hester’s shifting eyes that drowsed easily and were amused at anything, and she kept Jasper’s danger in secret likewise, setting her whole strength against it. She began to regather in mind bits of songs and stories, keeping them to sing and tell for the child, or when Nellie came or Henry she would ask about their mothers and fathers, as far back as they knew, which was only a little way. The farmer came again, knocking softly on the door. There would be a carpenter to begin building the room the following week, he said, and he lingered to ask her opinion of this plan or that. She could have a garden in the spring, he said; Jasper could fence off a little of the pasture, taking a day from the work of the farm any time he found convenient. Then Jasper borrowed a horse from him and rode away on the morning of the trial, going soon after daylight. In two hours or three he would be in the St Lucy country, stopping at Squire Stigall’s door, and she could see in her mind the Stigall gate, on the road beyond Wingate’s, far down the long stretch of road where the wagons died away slowly, but she could not divine what would pass inside the house. Men would come, hitching their horses to the gate, and Henry would come to testify. He would hold up his right hand and swear that his words would be the truth, and she pondered a little at how a thing could be true and untrue, both at once, but this eluded her and she was left searching for Squire Stigall until he became clear in a picture, his high shoulders, his slow steps, his carefully spoken words that laboured for exactness in any statement. ‘Did you or e’er one of yours see or hear a fifty pound shoat stray by today, shoat with a white band across its shoulder and a little white on its nose, fifty or fifty-five pound shoat?’ He had asked this once at the toll house.

  She watched the path toward the barn far into the twilight and after the dusk had arisen, and then Jasper’s step across the pasture stumping wearily on the uneven turf, the click of the gate, his foot at the door. He drank a long draught of water at the bucket and dropped his hat on the floor, his hand inert, or he sat at the table and ate hungrily, asking for more bread, calling shortly for more meat, his hunger sullen. He breathed heavily over his plate, sitting with his chest hanging over the table, leaning on the board, or if he dropped a crust to the floor he did not trouble to pick it up; tired to the core. ‘I’ll take water,’ he said, and Ellen brought him the gourd full of the water and he drank deeply again. Squire Stigall had passed the matter on to the Grand Jury and that body would meet late in the spring. A dozen people had come to the trial to be questioned and they had remembered any little thing he had ever said and all that had happened was turned this way and that.

  She set herself to save Jasper for it was her will that Jasper must not go. Whatever eggs were in the nest were for that purpose and the boiling of the pot over the fire was for that intent and the seeds she dropped in the garden row. Another letter came; the Grand Jury had found an indictment and Jasper would have to go to the court. He would have to give a bond and she thought of that and talked of it to the farmer. Then she asked the farmer to sign the bond. At the time of the May court Jasper went to the town and there he found that he must have a lawyer to defend him. Then the lawyer told the judge that Jasper was not ready with his defence and there was whispering to and fro. The judge saw that they were unready and he set the case for the October court. Hadn’t he, Jasper Kent, known that he would have to have a lawyer? Unless he intended to defend himself, and a laugh went over the court at this. There was more whispering back and forth. ‘But Joe Phillips is on his bond,’ was said, ‘and Joe Phillips is a good man, his farm worth anyhow twenty thousand dollars.’ ‘Oh, yes, he’s a good man.’ By the end of the week Jasper had told Ellen all that had happened in the court, a little now and a little then.

  One night there came a call outside and a knock at the step, and, the door opened, a strange man stood beyond the doorframe, a tall man with heavy shoulders. Then Jasper called him by name, saying, ‘Well, Nathan, I vum!’ and brought him over the threshold, and from their talk Ellen knew that he was a friend of Jasper’s from up in the Pike country. Once in a lull in their conversation Jasper nodded his head toward her with dignity and said, ‘That’s my wife,’ and the man replied, ‘I allowed so; I allowed she was your woman.’ ‘Well, Nathan, I vum!’ Jasper would say, trying to hold afresh the idea of his friend’s presence. ‘I came to see if I could be any help,’ Nathan had said soon after entering, ‘I heared you was maybe in for a little trouble.’ From time to time Ellen heard noises outside, footsteps muffled and a low voice, but she said nothing. Jasper told that the trial was set for October and told a little of what the lawyer advised, speaking with reticence but speaking straightforwardly, a clear story.

  ‘Is somebody along with you?’ Jasper asked.

  ‘A couple of men I fetched along,’ Nathan said, ‘and Tom. You remember Tom.’

  They sat in silence after that until Ellen could hear the small clock on the shelf as it ticked. The man was older than Jasper by a few years and his dark hair was slightly touched with grey. His hands were large and strong and they hung idly folded between his knees.

  ‘If you-all need any help, now,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t want, Tom and me, for you to think you lacked a friend or maybe two or three. Anything a strong man can do. Yes, we just said maybe we’d go.’

  After that they sat in silence for a while again, each man meditating the thought as it stood in his mind. Then Nathan arose and opened the door, waiting a moment as he leaned out into the dark. Two other shapes appeared rising on the steps, a large red-faced man and a strong gaunt boy of twenty or so. As they came into the room another followed and stood at the door, keeping back within the shadow. Jasper greeted the florid man as Tom and brought him to a seat, but the other stood by the door, twirling his hat about in his hand, some friend of Nathan’s. Then they were all still for a time, or someone would make a question about some casual or seemingly trivial thing, but every speech counted in their communion. Jasper was moved that he had friends who had come. Ellen saw this in his stiff voice and his silence. She saw it in his question of the way.

  ‘It’s nigh twenty mile to
where you come from. How far is it now from Pike’s to where you turn off?’

  ‘We taken the new road at Sidney’s old place. About sixteen mile, it is to the road crossen. Eighteen in all I reckon.’

  ‘Around eighteen,’ Tom said. ‘I’d call hit eighteen.’

  ‘Is the road good now?’ Jasper asked.

  ‘Right good a piece of the way. New worked.’

  ‘You came a-horseback?’ Jasper said. He was moved almost beyond speech by this expression of loyalty. ‘A-horseback I reckon.’

  ‘Yes, we rode our critters. Tom, he says to me, “I reckon you heared Jasper Kent is in trouble.” We asked in town on court day where you live now and by and by Tom he finds a man that knows.’

  ‘Is the road worked all the way to Pike’s now?’ Jasper asked.

  ‘All the way. A right fair road hit is in good weather.’

  They could feel Jasper’s gratitude and it repaid them for the long journey they had taken. Acknowledged gratitude loosened Tom’s speech so that he talked to great length of the roads, the ways to go, the shortcuts one could make in a dry season. He disputed a little with Nathan as to which of two ways was shortest, but joined him heartily again in computing another distance. Their long dialogue made a solution in which Jasper’s emotion could dissolve itself. When they were quiet again Jasper said:

  ‘I’m right proud, right proud to know you-all thought to come.’

  ‘We thought you might maybe need a man or so,’ Tom said.

  They sat a little while longer, stilled now for all had been said. Then Nathan said that they would go, and with a nod to her he went out at the doorway. Tom followed, nodding even more meagrely, and the young man inclined his head faintly in her direction as he went, looking at the ground. Jasper left the door open as long as their horses could be heard going back across the pasture.