The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  Ellen laid her infant in the cradle which Marthy Shuck loaned her. He was a serious creature, lying asleep nearly all the day, a good baby, Marthy said, and Ellen left him to his solemn goodness while she churned the milk and swept the floors and planted the late garden. Marthy Shuck had helped her with the birth of the child. It, the infant, was a joke to Jasper, for its littleness brought from him great roars of mirth and subdued oaths, pledges of a joyous paternity. ‘Dadburn his little hide! Come to your Pappy. God knows! Look at it! God knows!’

  They named the child Henry John. Jasper laid all his savings in Ellen’s hand and told her to get the child everything he would need. He did not aim that his child should want some small thing and not have it, lawyer or no lawyer, for God knew he was a little thing, just look at him! Then Ellen said she would get Job Tucker to make a cradle, for Job could work in wood like a master hand, and they could send Marthy’s cradle back. She sang to the child in the quiet of the cabin, morning and afternoon, song after song, from the first she had heard Nellie sing to the new songs Marthy Shuck had. Or she would stop as she held the child in her arms, dropping the song half-sung, and look at his flesh, at his eyes, his hair, his motions, another being that he was, apart from her and beyond her reach, and what did he want in life?

  What would Henry John want beyond what she wanted, and how could he want differently or more? She would try to lean down into his being and ask what did he want, to ask his soft neck and his crumpled legs, to ask his little round belly. She spent the money sparingly for the cradle, bargaining with Job Tucker until he lowered his price, saving the rest of the money for Jasper against the time of the trial. She tried to look beyond that time and to see them going about their ways, but every hour now pointed toward the week in October when the court would convene, and if Joe Phillips had signed to keep Jasper from having to lie in jail during the months before the trial, she had asked him to sign and he had done so after a day of thinking. If Jasper ran away the farmer would forfeit a thousand dollars, but Jasper would not run away without her, she thought, and it was she who had asked Phillips to sign. Sometimes she thought, turning about among the tasks in the cabin, that Jasper might think to run away as being the easiest course, or she would wonder if Jasper so thought, or she would look at him as he came in at the door with the stovewood in his arms, and the swift thought would arise. Then he would lean over the cradle and take Henry John, trundling out his great endearments, until the child knew him and beat his arms and legs in the air, quivering with delight because he was being taken. Henry would come, bringing Nellie, and then there would be a great noise in the cabin, for Henry would sing a loud song while he jolted Henry John in a chair, and Ellen would forget every other way but the way of that day and she would give them a basket filled with vegetables from her garden patch when they left or she would tell Nellie to keep the heifer but that she would take away her own little cow that Mr Al gave her when it brought milk again. She was happy to be able to give gifts.

  The time came when the trial was over and the anxious days past, but the lawyer was still to pay, fifty dollars in all, and Joe Phillips, the farmer, surety for the debt. Henry had been Jasper’s witness, and what Henry had seen and sworn to became the way of what had been although Albert and three of his friends had told differently and Mrs Wingate herself. But what Henry had seen was finally established as true. The trial had lasted two days, but on the second day the farmer had come across the field to tell her that Jasper was cleared, for he had heard by the telephone soon after the verdict was given. Later Jasper came, noisy and merry at being released from suspicion, but reticent and unwilling to talk, as if he were weary of it.

  Jasper was no longer in danger now of being taken away, and the prison where the men wore striped clothes and slept in cells of iron stood up clearly in her mind now as something one could look at without a sickening pang of fear. It grew sharper in line as her emotion withdrew from it; coldly pictured and apart, fading daily. The winter passed and spring came again, a spring of eager living in the pastures, in the cabin, eager living up in the plum thicket where the loud birds sang at early morning. There would be another child before the year was done. Slowly they were paying the lawyer, all that could be spared, Joe Phillips trusting them with the debt, giving them their time. Her body was strong now and the blood ran high in her cheeks and in her warm strong hands.

  The child was a girl and they named her Nannie because Jasper favoured that name, his own mother having been called by it. The girl child lay more quietly than the boy had lain, and Jasper delighted in her even more and he softened his way to her as if he considered that she was of the woman kind, even as she lay in the cradle. Ellen would look on from the door, pleased to see his gallantry flowering anew, to see him become a wooer as he took her tiny body from the pillow, addressing her with chivalrous admiration. ‘God knows! Teach her old Pap to dance, she will. First four forward and the grand right and left! God knows! Miss Nannie Kent, could I have the compliments of this-here next dance? Miss Nannie? Could I have the pleasure of the compliments? Swing your partners! Stand around, you-all, stand aside. Here comes Miss Nannie. God knows! Look at it!’

  He would take Hen to fish with him in the creek although Hen was but little over two years old and had to be carried. ‘The sign, she’s right in the foot, Hen, and the fish is bound to bite, so come along.’ He would take Hen as if he were a half-grown boy or a man, giving him a fish pole of his own, finding a delight in his companionship. The lawyer was paid now and Joe Phillips no longer stood on Jasper’s note for any thing. Jasper stood clear in the sight of the law, but one or two remembered, perhaps, that he had been tried on a felonious charge, or one or two, here and there, in the St Lucy country, still thought him guilty and Henry overheard him spoken of by some careless tongue as ‘the man who burned down Wingate’s barn’. Ellen had brought her cow from St Lucy, Henry having driven it slowly across the country in mid-winter, and by spring it had given them a heifer calf which, at weaning time, Ellen sold to the trader for twenty dollars, the last of the money needed to pay the lawyer’s charge. The cow and a few hens were Ellen’s property, and Joe Phillips gave her grape cuttings to plant and a little cherry tree. Nannie could walk now, and Hen could climb in the low trees of the plum thicket. The land about became more actual, hills and lowlands, trees and streams and hollows, yellow soil and dark, rocky roads and bushy paths. East to the crossroads and there was the little farm where Mrs Sadley lived, three miles to go. North, and there was the farmhouse, big and white, where Joe Phillips and his wife and his two boys stayed. Beyond came the road going outward toward the schoolhouse and the cabin of Bill Shuck and Marthy and their two or three children. The land was real and their wants were real, bread and meat and clothing, sleep and firewood, the cow to milk and the chickens to tend. The wages Jasper had were scarcely enough, but real, money to earn and to spend, over and over. It came upon her one day when Nannie was two years old that the land was more real, more hard and actual, stone for stone and soil for soil, more than it had been when she first came there. Somewhere back a way it had become so, and some where likewise money had become money, twenty-five cents to make a quarter, and all buying little enough.

  Twenty-five cents to make a quarter or ten cents to make a dime, and either buying little enough, and she slipped the coins through her fingers as they lay on the shelf. Jasper was clear of the law, but one or two had frankly thought him guilty, Henry had confided to her.

  She would sometimes glance at his great face as he came into the doorway and a quick thought would arise, and a question. Or she would see him lift some great weight, as a butchered hog, throwing it into a wagon, his sinews taut and his legs strong arched and grained, or see him stand relaxed after the feat, lighting his pipe to ease himself.

  He said that he would go to another place, to a place where he could grow tobacco on a sharing plan, which was not the way Phillips used. He told Phillips that he would go and another man was hired in his pla
ce, but in the end he was forced to take work where he received mere hire, for there was a small crop to be grown that year and places of any sort were hard to find. Ellen pictured a place vaguely set among trees, the consummation of some deeply-lying dream, a house looking toward some wide valley. Jasper was free of the law now and it was time they began to be, to realise, to find the truth of their old wish in a physical fact, to find it set at their hand. Good land lying out smooth, a little clump of woodland, just enough to shade the cows at noon, a house fixed, the roof mended, a porch to sit on when the labour was done; these were her promise. When Jasper said that they would leave Phillips her mind leaped to the better land they would find, their farm sometime, perhaps, but at any rate some place nearer their need and wish. She made many vague pictures of a house on a green hill, a well with a bright new pump, the handle easy to lift, the water coolly flowing. Some vague better haunted her through the eagerness of her going preparations, and her fervour to be gone built cunningly about her imagined new abode.

  They came to the place at mid-afternoon. The house was built starkly on the top of a stony hill in a waste place that would not serve for farming. The farmer, Byron Goddard, motioned them toward the cabin with a careless gesture, gave a few confused orders to Jasper, and rode away through the farm swiftly on his great horse. There were two rooms to the cabin. A few thin cedar trees grew on the hillside below the door. Ellen carried the water from a spring in the valley below and often the way seemed so steep to climb that she would spare the water grudgingly and wash Hen and Nannie in the same pan. The stony earth in the garden behind the house yielded little in return for her work there. From the hilltop she could see the green fields of the farm roll away toward the creek and she envied them their growth and hated them that her own patch burnt in the sun. She wanted to ask Goddard for a bit of the valley, a mere strip at the foot of the hill, to use for a garden, but Jasper forbade her to do this. ‘You stay up here on this-here hill,’ he said, ‘where we belong now.’ The contention became a permanent one and she was forbidden over and over. ‘Byron Goddard, he’s got no time for you, now,’ Jasper said. ‘He’d ride right over you, Ellie, and never see. Byron Goddard, he’s not Joe Phillips. Ask no favours, we will.’

  Jasper worked all day in the rich bottom fields where the crops teemed under the warm and abundant summer. From time to time his song would arise from the rich ploughing or harvesting. The richness of Goddard’s yields, his prancing blooded horses and quick trainers, his elegant barns and his training track, all made a show which captivated his men until they took all delight in the pageant, forgetting themselves. Ellen looked with hate upon the rich meadow that had taken Jasper’s zeal until his pride was in telling over and over the abundance of its cuttings. Another child was born during the summer and this they named Joe in honour of Mr Phillips.

  Hen and Nannie wore their clothes to rags but Ellen kept them to the hillside and visitors seldom came there. Her garden burnt in the sun for the shallow soil quickly gave up its moisture, and Jasper laughed at her tomato vines and her withering beans. ‘We got to wait here a spell,’ he said, ‘whe’r we want to or not.’ Or he would say, ‘Afterwhile…’ Goddard was slow to pay his hands, easy and light with their wages, gone from the farm on pay day as often as not and had no definite times for settlements. When Jasper came from work he would bring the meat to cook, fetched from Goddard’s smokehouse, or he would bring the flour or the meal or the sugar from the store, bought in small packages, scarcely more than a day’s need supplied at a time. Sometimes Ellen had a few eggs to trade, so few that she would remember Bell as she walked along the highway and feel that Bell’s stony gaze had come to her eyes.

  One Sunday Jasper borrowed a wagon from one of the barns and took Ellen and the children riding over the field roads, even into neighbouring land, up and down well-made ways that lay among fertile prospects, the harness streaming and jingling, beating lightly on the backs of the horses. Jasper pointed out the fields, taking a great pleasure and a pride in his labour, urging Ellen to look, showing Hen this and that. In the end they stopped at the stables to see the great show stallion which only the trainer was let ride. They looked at his sleek brown flesh that so throbbed with life that every morsel of it seemed a separate living thing. A stable man was leading him before the door, letting him drink at the smooth concrete watering trough where a jet of water fell, cool and leisured. Jasper stood before the great beast with pride and joy in his eyes, his feet wide apart, talking familiarly with the groom, and Ellen hated the neat boots on the horse’s ankles and she hated Jasper’s deep concern with the groom over the set of the horse’s left fore shoe. Riding homeward they stopped at the creek where Hen caught a brightly-mottled red water animal, a brook salamander, a creature for which they had no name, but which filled Ellen and Hen with amazement and delight. Hen found a broken pail in the brook sand and, filling this with water, he made the creature a nest of fine moss at the bottom, and all the way homeward they watched the animal glide about in its small basin and they shouted and sang in their delight, or Ellen and Jasper sang, turn and turn about, each trying to remember a song the other had not heard.

  There were other tenants living up and down the creek, some of the houses on the stony ridge where the creek bottom met the upland. Sometimes a woman would come up Ellen’s hill to sit awhile, or Ellen would go to the church in the maple grove, taking Hen. Then she sat among the tenant women who gathered near the rear of the church, and she would listen to their murmur or speak a little herself. The wives of the farmers would sit at the front talking through the waiting hour. Ellen knew the names of those in her group and where each one lived. They would talk quietly as if half afraid of their own voices. Later when the service began all would sing and then the preacher would exhort the world to greater goodness and truth. Ellen would walk back in the dry after-hour, Hen running beside her. Once walking home from the church with Hen at her side, her feet weary of the road and her dull dress lying down skimply under her eyes, she remembered two years back and recalled that Joe Phillips had looked at her in ways that showed that he liked her and that he liked the sound of her voice, and that he listened to her words, whatever they were. He had liked to come to her house and his face had lightened when he looked at her as if he thought her pretty to see, and once he had said to Hen, ‘He’s a pretty boy; he looks like his Mammy.’ Or, sitting waiting in the doorway, feeling a great weariness with her slow days, she would remember this again, and at the spring, before she dipped her bucket into the pool, she would lean over it to look at her face and search in the pool for any affirmation of her beauty.

  When the cow was without milk Joe and Nannie became hollow-eyed and thin, their beings waiting upon the hazards of the seasons. The hazards of the seasons followed them into the cabin in long rainy periods, the leaking roof scarcely leaving them one dry corner for their play. ‘Nothing but a new roof will mend it,’ Jasper said, ‘There’s ne’er a thing there to mend to.’ Ellen thought, when Joe was sick, that he might die, and she tried to build an indifference about her helplessness. She could not help it, the matter; she could not then care.

  If she stirred their food or washed their bodies she sank into each occupation, buried in its momentary demand. One day as she mixed the dough in the pan, stirring around and around, mixing the soda well into the wet mash, she was haunted with some forgotten thing. The yellow of the egg gave the batter a faint glow and made it fall and rise in a rich oily lava, thick and pliable, but now and then the grains of the meal became visible, taking their granular form on the surface above the stiff pliability of the mass. Around and around, stirring, the oval ridge of the batter rising beside the spoon and sinking away into a lap of flowing mass, ring on ring, until there was nothing but the faint shape left as the ripple approached the outer rim of the pan. Circles flowing outward through thick oily dough, flowing outward through heavy pliant matter, rising and falling, nearer and further, renewed and sinking back and renewed, over and over,
in a perpetual orbit. She watched the flow as she stirred and stirred, looking at the motions and leaning a little nearer. Suddenly a soft whisper came to her lips as she looked, as she penetrated the moving mass, a whisper scarcely breathed and scarcely articulated, as would say, ‘Here… I am… Ellen… I’m here.’

  She went often to the church to be among the women and to feel the warmth of the singing and of the preacher’s voice. She would sit in the hour before the service with the other quiet-spoken women at the rear of the church, and hear their talk, believing their words. They talked of good places where they had formerly lived, of the number of cows they were allowed to keep, or they would speak of their husbands, of their generosity and thought. One would tell a little of her childhood home, or of a sister or brother, or they would talk of sickness or death or grief. But they came back over and over to their men for they were young as yet. Ellen heard them as if she heard a fairy tale of life, believing, and it was comforting to be there, to sit among them before the time of the singing and the sterner comfort of the preacher.

  ‘Lige, he gave me the money for a new dress, but law, I said, I’ll wear the old a spell yet.’

  ‘Same with Charlie. And he gave me two dollars for shoes.’

  ‘Sam, he tells me to go to the store and buy whatsoever I fancy, no matter what hit comes to. But me, I don’t like to spend.’

  Sometimes one wore a new garment, but usually they kept the same apparel all spring and summer, and their faded garments withered as the summer drew toward the autumn. Ellen could not go to the church many times more, for another child would come, a child she did not want. Autumn and it would come. All week she would sit in the doorway waiting. Jasper had spent the money that Goddard had owed him, his back pay, for a wild, unbroken horse; drunk he had become on horseflesh. She would sit in the door all week, idle, for there was nothing to sew. There was a small bit of coin in the tin can on the shelf, twenty cents, perhaps, and that would buy the next sugar or meal. One day she saw the children, the three born and the one unborn, as men and women, as they would be, and more beside them, all standing about the cabin door until they darkened the path with their shadows, all asking beyond what she had to give, always demanding, always wanting more of her and more of them always wanting to be. She took up the bucket and went down the hill to the spring, walking quickly as if she were pursued. ‘Out of me come people forever, forever,’ she said as she went down the hill-path.