The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘I won’t be old,’ Melissy said. ‘I don’t aim to let it come, not that-there. I’ll grow up but that’s all I aim.’

  An old man lived down the road beyond the schoolhouse, living with some woman, his niece or granddaughter who was always seen plodding through the work or sitting barefoot in the doorway. The old man walked with a bent spine, throwing out his twisted legs, carrying a basket and searching the herbs of the roadside for something. The schoolboys called him Old Live-forever. They would shout to him as they passed him on the road or as he searched the grass. ‘Hi, there, Old Live-forever!’ And then, out of his high thin voice, bursting from his crumpled old throat, ‘God almighty!’ Searching the roadside for some greens or something to eat. The boys: ‘Hello, Old Live-forever!’ and the reply, ‘A little piece of greens for my dinner, a little mess.’ Sometimes he would laugh with the boys and call out, ‘Good day, young men!’ waving his twisted hand spirally under his shoulder. ‘Oh, God knows! A little piece of greens for my pot.’ Ellen often saw old Sansbury as she passed along the road going to the store down beyond the creek. One day she saw him eating a piece of something he had picked up from the road, a bit of some child’s school lunch thrown away.

  ‘Nor old Sansbury,’ Ellen said. ‘Don’t ever let me hear a one of you youngones call out to old Mr Sansbury and call him names. No matter if he can’t hear.’

  ‘I don’t aim to get old,’ Melissy said. ‘I’ll grow up but that’s all I aim to do. Wrinkledy face! Crooked back! You reckon I’d be like that? Grow up is all I aim.’

  Nannie was pretty now, thirteen years old. She watched how the other girls had their dresses made and was eager for a bit of ribbon or a lace or a scallop or a ruffle. A woman, she was, come early to her flowering, like the women of Jasper’s people. In the heat of the summer she would put her hair in a little twist on the top of her head and bits of it would fall in tiny curls over her forehead. She would bring a girl home with her named Cordie Peters and they would gather the berries from the pasture briars and make them into a conserve, or they would wash their hands afterward in sour milk to whiten their fingers. A boy from a neighbouring farm, Lige Newton, would sometimes come on an errand or pass over the hill going to the creek to seine, and he would stop to talk to Hen or to them where they rested under the poplar tree, and after he was gone they would tell over all that he had said, laughing and calling his name, pursuing his words with repetitions and laughter and contriving sayings that would bring back his name to their talk. With Dick and Joe, Nannie went away to the school in the early morning, during late summer and autumn when the school kept, trudging off through the dust of the wagon track to the dustier road and then out of sight beyond the turn, or they came home late in the day, having stopped at the wild crab tree, soiled and tired, often carrying their dusty shoes in their hands.

  ‘I aim to read books,’ Dick said. ‘There’s more than a million books in the world and I’ve not read e’er one yet. I aim to know everything. I aim to read a heap of books. It’s in books is found the wisdom of the world, they say.’

  ‘You!’ Hen said. ‘What books?’

  ‘More than a million, maybe two million. I lay off to read all the books on the earth, or nohow all the good ones. But I ain’t read e’er a one yet.’

  A man, Luke Wimble, came into the country to sell fruit trees to the farmers, the trees to be delivered to the farms and set in the ground in late autumn. He came to the tenant house on the hill many times, always eager to talk, always sitting down in the house or in the doorway.

  Then he asked Ellen and Jasper to board him, saying that he would be glad to sleep in the loft with the boys. All day he went up and down the roads and lanes, selling fruit trees and vines and shrubs to the farm owners, but at supper time he was back at Ellen’s table where he liked to talk with any who gave him replies. His face bore a perpetual smile embedded in the way of its muscles, and everyone liked him. He said that he was twenty-eight years old. He would lean near her to hear what little Melissy whispered, his round boyish face in a faint smile of anxiety and concern, and then, having replied to her, he would beam a great smile upon the whole table and pass his hand over his hair in delight. He would tell of the wonders of plants and trees and he never knew or noticed if the boys teased.

  ‘And onions, they belong to the lily family, would you suppose it? And garlic,’ he said. ‘But apples now, they belong to the rose.’

  ‘Pass the lilies, please,’ Hen said, speaking very softly, ‘please pass the lilies o’ the valley.’

  ‘I’m plumb a fool about my lilies,’ Joe said. ‘But they do strong me, seem like. They strong my breath.’

  ‘When Hen lays off to kiss Cordie Peters, that day he don’t eat his lilies,’ Joe said again. ‘You just watch Hen.’

  ‘I eat whatsoever I want to,’ Hen said, ‘and if Cordie she don’t like it she can lump it.’

  ‘But the best peaches are the Mayflower, and that’s a white cling, white meat and a good pie peach or eater,’ Luke said. ‘And there’s the Carmen, white in the meat and part cling and part free, or if you want a yellow meat, why there’s the Elberta or maybe there’s the JH Hale, both yellow meat and free stone, or the Crawford Late and that’s a prime peach for sure.’

  Or he would lean aside to catch little Melissy’s whisper and to help her plate, or she would ask for another noggin of milk, beaming over his words. He ate his food heartily, never knowing one kind from another nor caring which he ate, for all were happily taken.

  ‘And apples, there’s the Hawkseye Greening, a big apple from a seedlen, or take the Secor and that’s a cross between Salome and Jonathan. It’s a medium red, very good it is, fine. Stores away better than old Jonathan, too. A cross between old Jonathan and Salome.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Jasper said.

  ‘But the JH Hale peach, it don’t bear fruit when it’s planted by itself. It has to be planted near a Banner or, say, a Elberta. And the reason for that-there, it’s simple. It has to get the pollen offen one or the other. And the Sharon, that’s a cross-bred apple. But the American Beauty, that’s my favourite to eat in hand. I’ll be back to set out along in late fall.’

  ‘October light moon be about right for that-there,’ Jasper said.

  ‘I wouldn’t set any great store by the moon to tell me when to plant. The moon has got some properties, that I’d say, but I never set out by the moon.’

  Joe had been in a fight again with Lin Wallace and Ellen knew what the fight had been about. Lin had called out to Joe at playtime, called out before all the school, ‘Jasper Kent, he’s a barn burner. He burned up a man’s barn over around St Lucy and almost got in the pen. I’d be a feared to let old Jasper Kent come on my place. Joe Barn-Burner is that boy’s name.’

  ‘What did you do to Lin?’ Ellen asked. ‘In your turn what did you do?’ Her head was lifted and her bosom high.

  ‘I gouged his head but he pinned me down. He’s bigger. I fought back but he pinned me down and I couldn’t get my hand loose. He’s bigger.’

  ‘I’ll get him along the road a Monday,’ Hen said. ‘You just wait.’

  ‘He’s bigger’n you even,’ Joe said. ‘He’s got a knife to stab with, too.’

  ‘I saw that knife, Lin’s knife. It’s plumb five inches long, the blade is,’ Dick said. ‘I saw it today.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Ellen muttered to Jasper as they stood together beside the door. ‘A knife to cut my boy with. To let your boys get cut to pieces in a fight over what you done or didn’t do. Did you burn up that-there barn or not, Jasper Kent? A knife to stab with! For God’s sake!’

  Jasper went out to the well and drew up a bucket of water, slow with the winch. Then he carried the bucket in at the door, a great man that filled up the doorway, and strode across the floor with it to the place where it always stood on the table. The lamp quivered in its own light and settled back to a nucleus of light on the shelf above the fireplace, and Ellen left the corner by the door and moved throug
h the atmosphere that had suddenly grown real – half comprehended and half vague – as the menace of the knife was less keenly realised. Clearing away the food and the dishes while Nannie put Melissy to bed and Hen mended a tool under the light she heard them all, going, ordering, calling, hurrying in and out, quarrelling, snarling back, defending each other, laughing, making jokes she could never have thought to make, and it came to her that these were of her, these people, but that they owned her somehow more than she owned them. Luke Wimble had said before he went that words came out of his mouth sometimes so fast that he hardly knew himself that he had said them or how he came to think them at all. They were his own words, he said, but they somehow stood outside himself as if they talked to him and made him wonder.

  Jasper went plodding over the fields, labouring without end, a great man, tall in a doorway, bent a little forward when he walked. He was always busy, making off to work as soon as he had eaten, falling asleep at night as soon as he became quiet, even while he sat in his chair. As he came from the autumn ploughing, stooped by the furrows, he would stalk over the stones that lay behind the kitchen door. He seemed old and weary, effaced, as if he withdrew and left no reckoning. Or inside the house one day she heard Nannie and Joe and Dick as they came from school, stopping to drink, each one, a deep draught from the bucket at the well, continuing a conversation they had been holding as they came, weary and dry after the long walk home in the heat of the day, contemplative and final:

  ‘Nohow, my pap, he’s an upright man. I heared a man say one time while I waited inside the shop, the time Collie Childs fixed the singletree, I heared a man say, a man I never knowed, “Jasper Kent, he’s a good upright man and you can lay your last copper on that.”’

  ‘My pap is honest,’ Nannie said. ‘Wouldn’t steal a pin, Pap wouldn’t. I heared a man talk once to Mr Enzer…’

  ‘I did too,’ Joe said. ‘“Jasper Kent you could trust to the end of the world,” he said. Said, “You could take Jasper Kent’s reckonen and never count the change.”’

  Jasper and Hen were cutting the tobacco crop now, early autumn, all day long, working slowly and stooping again and again over the field. Jasper would split the stalk from the top downward and then sever it near the ground, handing it then to Hen who hung the inverted plant on the long lath that stood by, later loading these onto the wagon to haul them to the barn, and the field grew more and more ragged as the labour passed over it and its yield was taken away. Or, moonlight, and Cordie and Nannie and Hen and Joe and Lige Newton, – they romped under the locust tree, and played Lay Low Sheep and Wheel and Turn, or ran down to the persimmon tree to hunt for the ripened fruit. All the other tobacco fields were despoiled now, ragged, cut-over as they lay, in the valleys and onto the hill-slopes, and all the barns from farm to farm were filled with the limp plants, the shutters opened to the air, and an odour of burning hung in the winds, or hazes lay inert against the sky and against the sloping hills. Then Joe tracked an opossum home to his den in a hollow tree, and on the next night all the dogs were out and all the boys, over the pastures and hills to the bluffs along the river, whooping and barking, the boys and the dogs, until the beast took shelter in a tall tree that even Hen could not climb and crouched there looking down upon them, glistening white in the moonlight.

  Then Luke Wimble came back to set his trees into the soil, came across the fields one twilight with his spade on his shoulder, and that night there was playing again under the locust tree until the roistering surged out into the pasture beyond any shadows, beyond the mockernut tree, Hen and Cordie and Nan and Joe dancing, until Luke was begged to join in the play and he said that he would if Ellen would come. Then Ellen danced with them and her feet were light and her steps were quick, as eager as Hen’s or as light as Nannie’s, even more eager and light. She saw her shadow on the ground as she danced and she could scarcely take her eyes from it, for it was the shadow of girl with slim ankles and straight round thighs and supple shoulders. She danced with Luke Wimble or with Hen, and then with Luke again, and the moonlight made the blood run like cold liquid silver in her veins, and when Luke came back for her at the second turn his face was open like the moonlight.

  ‘I’ll shake you down a mockernut ball and that is the fruit of the mockernut tree, like a split golden apple. I’ll get you one and one for Nannie and one for Cordie, to dance with them in your hair.’

  Those autumn mornings Ellen went from one labour to the next, her feet light and her lips softly singing some tune Nannie sang, and she remembered the odour of the mockernut hulls and remembered the soft feel of the turf underfoot, her eye seeing inwardly her slim shadow as it danced, a shadow taller than Nannie’s but as slim and light moving, or she walked proudly erect through her rooms and onto the platform behind the house, carrying this or that task forward, feeling that she had forgotten something but caring little for any lost recollections, living lightly and freely with the passing days, identified with Nannie, merged with her in the lightness of limb and in the vague, misty outward-flowing thought of her mind. Then Luke Wimble brought her an apple tree, a gift to her, and he set it out in a sunny, wind-sheltered place one noon of day. It was a Kentucky Bell, he said, a great red apple to ripen in the fall, delicious to eat in the hand and to store away for the winter. While he cut away the sod he talked of a red mulberry tree he had seen at the edge of a field, the leaves fallen now, but a glory it would be in the early summer, the leaves yellow-green then. He stopped then to take out his order book and read the names of the trees the farmers had bought.

  ‘J.B. Brown, six apple trees, Sweet Delicious and Early Harvest. I can see the Sweet Delicious where I set out in a row, like little girls a-waiten to bloom. Arland Booker, he took peaches, Sharons and Elbertas, a dozen trees. He’ll be right glad he took Elbertas when they come on to ripen, two or three years from now. A big ripe peach is like a promise in a wilderness and like the sweet breath of Jehovah in the early day.’ He would dig a little at the hole for the gift tree, spading with care. ‘Apple blossoms are a shy flower, did you ever notice? Pale white and close to the branch, up and down. I set out two Solways and ten Elbertas and four Carmens and a Mayflower today, a white cling that is, white meat and good any way you take it, juicy and full of sweet, and when I see you dance under the mockernut tree I says to myself, “She’s like a flower in bloom.”’

  ‘You ought to be a-sayen such to some girl, Nannie maybe. You ought to be a-sayen the likes of that to Nan or Cordie, not me,’ Ellen said.

  He would spade a little and talk again. ‘And when I dig the hole for the Sweet Delicious I says to myself, “She’s like a apple ripe on the tree.”’

  ‘You ought to be a-sayen it to some girl. That’s what you want.’

  ‘And if I could kiss you once, Ellen Kent. I says today when I planted out the Elbertas, pink on one side and free of the stone, luscious and sweet, I says, “Could I kiss her once?” And that night under the mockernut I wanted.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a girl somewheres to say it to, some girl eighteen or twenty maybe?’

  ‘You’re a bright shiny woman, Ellen Kent, and it’s all I can do to keep my eyes offen you. The apple tree, it blooms with a little pink in the white and the peach is all pink. The dogwood is like a star in the forest and the redbud is a sunset against a hillside. Then there’s honey and that’s the fruit of the bee, the flower of the bee-gum, you might say, and there’s kinds of that, bee honey and ant honey, did you ever hear it said?’ He fitted the little tree to the place but took it away and spaded again. ‘They take the sweet outen the grass even, and even outen the mud. Some of it dark, the wild honey, and some strong and bitter, but all of it sweet, and it’s the fruit of the bee.’ He fitted the tree into place for the last time and began to set the earth about it. ‘Did you ever walk in spring in the woods and find these-here little white flowers, rare they are, under a layer of old leaves, little white flowers just out of the ground? Hepaticas they are. Did you ever? God bless you! And in the hill count
ry, arbutus and laurel. Windflowers are little white sheep on a mountain pasture, and all the time you’re as shiny as a dogwood tree in spring, Ellen Kent.’

  ‘You ought to be a-sayen it to Nan, or to Cordie,’ Ellen said. ‘Nan, she’s a little woman, grown she is, but young, all a grown woman’s ways sometimes. And Cordie is pretty, I see that. Sharp teeth in a smooth row and a little dimple on her face. Nan with her hair up in a knot, particular about her dress and whe’r there’s lace or not.’

  ‘If I could kiss you one time I’d chance the rest in life, Ellen Kent.’

  ‘You never noticed yet how Nan has got a pretty dimple aside her eye or how quick Cordie is to get angry, a frown on her face and her mouth to say sharp things, sharp talk, bite in it. “You needn’t be so smart, Luke Wimble,” she’d say, “so struck on your own self and so sure you’re wanted.” Hear her say it? “So sure you’re wanted.” In another year a dozen will be after Cordie. You’ll see. Or some other girl, the same as Cordie but away from here, where you live maybe. Her mouth gives up its mad and smiles again, and you there close. Your own girl and ne’er a thing to hinder.’

  Luke pressed the earth close around the apple tree, treading it with his foot and smiling at the toe of his shoe, his head bent and his brows drawn, smiling in his perplexity.

  ‘You’re worth all the balance put alongside each other,’ he said. He pressed the soil firmly down and laid the sods in place, pressing them carefully. ‘You’re worth all the balance and to spare. You got the very honey of life in your heart. Today I says to myself while I dug the holes for the Sharons and the Elbertas in Arland Booker’s orchard, I says, “She’s got the honey of life in her heart.”’

  Nellie went about habitual tasks, doing each one in the ways her hands had long ago learned, glad she no longer cared, eased from caring now, and forgetful whether there were six eggs in the basket or ten, but hoarding the basket under the bed from a long habit, even if there were none. It seemed that for her it was over, and no matter, whatever it had been, this passage, this life, this strange long curious thing without alternative. Ellen prepared clothing for Nellie and Henry and sent Hen to them often, for he could make the long journey on horseback in half a day and return a day or two later; or sometimes she went herself, driving with Hen or Joe. Henry became sick, lying in a stupor on his bed or fretting. He wanted to leave St Lucy, he said. He was afraid he would take root there and he was not of a mind to take root in that poor place. When he died he seemed alone in his dying. To Ellen, as she straightened Nellie’s house, preparing for it, he seemed to have taken an arbitrary course, bent upon it, while she and Nellie left him to his chosen way, abandoned him to it, though she could find no other mood or feeling within herself and no approach to him, no help. She set Nellie’s house to rights while he lay in his long stupor, distraught by the universal feeling which one has for the dying; pain, vexation, weariness, sorrow.