The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  Ellen and Jasper took all the money they had, with Hen helping with his savings, to buy Henry a simple burial. Nellie went to live with Bell Carrier. She had feared emotion as a visitation from without herself, and Bell, having none, gave her ease. ‘I’m here now and I’ll stay,’ she said. Going about the small rough farm in the Rock Creek country, her home now, Ellen would remember Nellie, from first to last, a structure which she knew almost entirely in her senses, her deep inner knowledge which lay behind memory. She would gather Nellie to an entity, remembering her youth, her ways, her history, her look; Nellie had had yellow curls when she was a child, but her hair had turned to dun-brown before it had become streaked with grey; when she was a little child she had once climbed to the top of a tall gate to watch some people pass, and she had sung out, ‘Mr Man, your pipe made some smoke get in my eyes,’ and the passer had given her a dime, had folded the coin tight into her little fist. She screamed all night when she lost her first children, all then being dead, but when she lost all again she had gone about in a hard quiet or had sat still in her house.

  Going about the rough barnlot of the farm above Rock Creek, calling in the hens, breaking them corn, Ellen would merge with Nellie in the long memory she had of her from the time when she had called from the fence with so much prettiness, through the numberless places she had lived or stayed and the pain she had known, until her mother’s life merged into her own and she could scarcely divide the one from the other, both flowing continuously and mounting. Or hearing Hen’s foxhorn, a hoarse note without music, a rough throaty call, she would wonder that the swift cry of a horn had once gone into her like a glad spear, and she would penetrate her own history, into memories long habitually forgotten. It had seemed forever that she had travelled up and down roads, having no claim upon the fields but that which was snatched as she passed. Back of that somewhere in a dim darkened dream like a prenatal vision, she saw a house under some nut trees, a place where she lived, but as clearly seen as this she could see her brother Davie and the others, the more shadowy forms of the older children although all of them were dead before she was born. So that this house with the odour about it of nut shells was all embedded now in the one dream that extended bedimmed into some region where it merged with Nellie’s memories. Life began somewhere on the roads, travelling after the wagons where she had claim upon all the land and no claim, all at once, and where what she knew of the world and what she wanted of it sparkled and glittered and ran forward quickly as if it would always find something better. Down one road and up another and down again, and the woman she called Tessie West always went ahead, but at each journey’s end she herself would run to Tessie’s wagon where it was hitched beside the road. She tried to think then what might have come to Tessie in all the years that had passed and how she would seem now and how look, but there was no way to think of her except as something brightly shining and diffused through the years of the roads and through the roads themselves. She could not clearly see how Tessie looked although she remembered her sitting beside her log fire one night and remembered her dull coat and her red and blue headscarf. ‘If I met Tessie on the road,’ she thought, ‘I’d maybe not know it. Even if I met her as she was then without e’er change in her look,’ and she thought of this sadly for a little while. ‘Or maybe if I knowed her now I’d say what a durned fool woman that is, to talk eternally about tom-foolery, God knows!’ But this thought she denied any place although it lasted in spite. ‘She might come in that-there door or she might already ’a’ come, any day, and I, maybe, said, “What a no-account wearisome woman, God knows!” It might be that way.’

  As she sewed at some garment, rocking softly to and fro with the sway of her needle, she stopped, the seam stayed and the thread taut in her hand, stopped and remembered life. Life and herself, one, comprehensible and entire, without flaw, with beginning and end, and on the instant she herself was imaged in the lucid thought. A sense of happiness surged over her and engulfed her thinking until she floated in a tide of sense and could not divide herself from the flood and could not now restore the memory of the clear fine image, gone in its own accompanying joy. The joy exhausted, she sat lax in an apathy, unthinking and unfeeling, staring at the wall without sight, but her hands remembered their habit of the needle and the stitches fell again, over and over, her body swaying softly to and fro. It was early spring now, the lean time of the year, the cold spring. There was little to eat but bread and bacon. Some farm bell rang, far off over the hard hills, a faint sound beating thin against the air. It was after eleven o’clock, then, time to prepare the food. Jasper would come across the meadow, bent, stiff. She could feel the noon reaching over the entire country, valley and stony hills, the farm bell leaving faint echoes in the mind together with hunger, a feel of the approach of food, bacon and bread and grease.

  She felt the noon on her skin, and she heard it in her ears and tasted it in her mouth. It lay on her seam like a load and dragged at her needle. It was imperative; it could not be set aside. She carried the slop to the pigs while the kitchen fire kindled. They were running in the lot behind the barn, and while they lapped at the greasy water and nosed out the choice morsels she looked after the hens. When the pigs had eaten she could feel their soft round noses on her ankles as they followed her down the lot grumbling, squealing, wanting more, the white-nosed one at her right heel, the runt at her left.

  ‘I couldn’t fill you-all if I tried,’ she said. ‘It’s a hog’s way to be empty.’ A sudden thought of them in November, wallowing in corn and mud, knocked in the head, their throats cut, hung up to bleed, scalded in the big pot. Then cut into sides and hams and shoulders. She herself would render the lard; she would trim the little pieces of gut fat off the chitterlings and stew it down in a kettle by the well. She would give some of the offal to the dogs and bury some of it in the garden, offal from the little white-footed runt now at her right ankle. This was his measure of life. ‘I’d like to know how you’d live in winter,’ she said to herself. ‘The only way is not to make any pet out of stock. How you’d live in winter without you had your sowbelly to eat and your lard to fry in and the hams to trade at the store for sugar and coffee?’

  The farms about were poor and rough, the land selling for small sums by the acre. Jasper had thought that in a year or two he might begin to buy the place he now farmed.

  The people met at the store or at the smith-shop in the hamlet or at the church a few miles away. Many of their men were outspoken in anger and many of them carried weapons, even to the church. On preaching days the great voice of the preacher rolled over their scuffling feet as they came and went during the service, as he admonished their hates and their too-ready angers. The men stood together to oppose some marketing measure which had been initiated outside their neighbourhood, resenting it. ‘It’s a poor country,’ Ellen said. ‘That I see. Hard, it is. But some of the folks are right nice. Mrs Shepherd to send us milk when little Melissy was sick. And Mrs Scruggs so glad to get the flower seeds Nan had to swap her for another kind. But a hard country, no matter.’ ‘But I could buy this farm cheap, and easy terms,’ Jasper said. The cold spring had begun, winter lingering. Jasper and Hen had burned their plant bed to prepare for the sowing of the seeds, and Nannie and Dick cut greens from the pasture. One day as they worked together in the barn Hen told Ellen of a mishap at the shop the day before. Jasper had had words with Lobe Baker. Lobe had stopped his wagon before Jasper’s team and when Jasper had asked Lobe to draw aside he had been given a curt reply and an oath. He would drive off when he pleased, Lobe had said, and not sooner, sitting swaggering on his lead horse.

  ‘He and Pap had words,’ Hen said.

  ‘Pap, he’s not afeared of Lobe Baker,’ Ellen said after a little.

  ‘Then Lobe, he made Pap wait a right smart while and all the rest stood around to see if there’d be a fight, but Pap sat still on his seat. I see he was out-done and ready to fight, he was that mad. But Pap didn’t want e’er fight, not that day nohow.
Seems as if Pap had it in head he wouldn’t fight that-there time. He just sat still and waited till Lobe Baker drove off, a right long while it was too.’

  Ellen mended the coops, with Hen to help, preparing for the summer broods when they should come. She would grow many chickens, she decided, to have something for Nan to trade at the store, for Nan would be wanting a fresh new dress or more with the summer. Perhaps she would make a little parlour for Nan in the room beyond the chimney, or so she thought, a place where her children’s young friends could come for their play-parties, and she thought of what she would do to freshen the room and make it fair, the roof mended and the window panes set in the sashes and the walls newly whitewashed some good bright day in late spring. Nannie and Joe would do the work gladly, and later she would buy some chairs and then carpeting when she could. She told Nannie of her plan one day when the spring was still cold and wet, bleak with the over-late winter, and Nannie and Joe worked over the coops and cleaned the pens eagerly, hurrying the spring.

  They were sitting about the open fire in the short evening, Ellen, Hen, Nannie, Joe, and Dick. Jasper had gone to his bed in the rear of the cabin room and slept, his face turned away from the firelight.

  ‘The light in the sky last night was Lobe Baker’s stable,’ Hen said. ‘Baker’s stable went up last night. Lum Crouch passed along the lane just afore dark. He told me.’

  ‘Nohow my Pap didn’t burn it,’ Joe said. ‘Pap wasn’t offen the place for two days back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t let e’er other boy even say what you said. Of course Pap didn’t,’ Hen said.

  ‘Pap wasn’t off this place for two days, three, was he Mammy? I’d swear to that in court.’

  ‘Nobody thinks Pap burned it,’ Ellen said. ‘Don’t talk about any such. Pap was right here with us and nohow he never. Don’t even say it in a joke.’

  ‘A fire at night against the sky is a sight to see,’ Nannie said. ‘Last night it was. Like the end of the world. Like the song, “Cast on Water”. Scotland to burn, all Scotland in the song.’

  ‘I aim to know songs and about the things in songs,’ Dick said, speaking softly. ‘I aim to know more than I can now think about or tell.’

  ‘Mammy can sing you a heap of songs herself,’ Hen said. ‘You could learn a heap from Mammy.’

  ‘I already know all Mammy knows. And I want better. And more. I want more than songs. And I want better than “Bangum and the Boar” and “Mary Go and Call” and “Lady Nancy Belle”. Better than any you’d name.’

  ‘“Nancy Belle” is a good piece,’ Nannie said, ‘and “Sweet William” too.’

  ‘I want better. It’s a good piece enough but I want songs I never yet heard. There must be better songs, a hundred maybe, songs to tell you all you want to know about the world.’

  ‘“Sweet William” is like a story book. Sing “Sweet William”, Mammy.’

  ‘I want better songs,’ Dick said. ‘I already know “Sweet William”. And I want books to know and read over and over. I aim to have some of the wisdom of the world, or as much as ever I can get a hold on. There’s a heap of wisdom in books, it’s said, all the learnen of the world, and that’s what I want to have, or as much as ever I can. I couldn’t bear not to. I couldn’t bear to settle down in life and not.’

  The strangeness of Dick’s want bewildered Ellen and saddened her until her contemplation passed into a remote rapture. This strange want rendered her speechless while the children sat on by the fire or stole away one by one to their beds, for she felt her own being, in Dick, pushed outward against the great over-lying barrier, the enveloping dark. His want startled her with its determination and its reach, coming upon her as something she knew already, had always known, now enhanced and magnified, unappeased. She continued to sit beside the fire long after they were gone, trying to penetrate the thought, her eyes on the embers. Finally she went to her bed, lying down beyond Jasper, with the curious sadness still about her.

  Ellen awakened to hear a great burst of voices beating upon the cabin and cutting the air of the room where she lay. The cold of the night streamed in at the opened door, and many great hooded shapes, men, had dragged Jasper from the bed. The creatures wore black cloths over their faces. They had carried Jasper out at the door, and “The Barn-Burner!” was in the chaos of their yells and cries, rose out of their tramping clamour. ‘Bring out that Barn-Burner! Hang to this-here limb! No, whips this time. Get back offen the road! Let the whips!’ Their feet sopped incessantly in the mud and churned the soft dooryard to a wallow. Then the lashes fell like a swift hail, a lash and then another hard upon it. She was standing in the shadow of the door, her body shivering with the cold and her breath stilled except where it leaped and jerked with the spasmodic leap of her heart where life would not quit her. Jasper was down where he had been flung, a white shape in the dark of the mud, and the black creatures with the whips were standing and turning about, a circle of cleared ground left about the white of the mud in which the whips could play. The clamour and the scene moved swiftly; ‘The Barn-Burner! Give fifty more!’

  She walked out of the house, her bare feet sinking into the cold mud, her night garment limp against her body as she went swiftly through the damp air. She walked into the circle of the men and stood in the bare space left for the whips, and her coming was so headlong that blows fell upon her shoulders and on her breast before she was seen. She came with hard words and a deep malediction, laying curse on curse, speaking into the black rag faces without fear, careless of what came to her for it. ‘You get off en him,’ she said. ‘You white-trash! Rags on your faces! Take off your whips. You dirty low skunks! You hit him again now if you dare. Get back. I know you. I know the last one. I could call out your names. Lay your whips on me; you already hit me. Hit more. You skulken low-down trash!’

  She cursed them with a blasting prediction that they would never forget this night, that they would remember it in dying, and she called out their names. But they went quickly. The lashes that had fallen upon her were the last, for while she was speaking they leaped to their horses and rode away in a hard gallop. She did not wait for their going nor give them one moment of watching as they leaped down the lane, but she turned to Jasper, who lay still on the ground, as one dead or deeply swooned. She unbound the rope that held fast his arms and roused him a little and lifted him to his feet so that he walked or was dragged to the house, leaning upon her and not knowing what he did. Inside the house he fell to the floor before the fireplace and she turned quickly back to the door, which she fastened securely with a chair, wedging the chair tightly under the rail, for the mob had broken the latch. Then she hung a comforter over the window, working swiftly in an agony of fear and caution and pride in her own. When she had secured the door from attack and the window from prying eyes she turned to Jasper, who lay filthy with mud and blood, lying across the floor before the fireplace. It seemed to her that this was her own matter, hers and Jasper’s, and that she would not call Hen or Nannie. She would not want them to see Jasper lying naked and bleeding in a welter of mud. It was her own matter. She kindled the fire quickly and brought water to heat and a basin and cloths. Then she bathed Jasper’s wounds, weeping over them, and she washed all the mud from his body and put warm clothing upon him, rubbing his feet to warm them, and after a while he came to consciousness and turned to his side with a great shuddering sob of humiliation.

  On the next day rain fell without ceasing, and if anyone came to the lane Ellen did not know of it. Jasper sat all day before the fire in the darkened room. ‘Pap must be sick,’ Joe said. The boys worked all day in the barn, mending the harness, embarrassed by the subdued house, or if they entered they walked on tiptoe. Once Nannie stood beside Jasper’s chair, her arm across his shoulder, and they whispered a little together. Often he slept in his chair as one broken with weariness. Toward nightfall the rain ceased and the air grew crisp for a frost.

  Ellen prepared supper early, the children having gathered to the kitchen. From some
look of trouble in his face she knew that Hen had learned of what had happened. All day she had seen the distant houses, cabins like their own, as they stood remotely set in the mist of the rain and in their menacing withdrawals, as if a great circle had been drawn about their cabin to exclude it from the countryside.

  ‘Pap he’s sick today,’ Joe said. ‘I see that. He’s dauncy all day.’

  ‘He’s got some trifle on his mind,’ Nannie said, ‘and it’s unknowen how much a trifle can worry a body, when you study it over.’

  ‘Pap’s not much to talk, but he studies out a heap in his head.’

  ‘If all the people in a country turned against you why that would be a thing to study over,’ Hen said. He spoke bitterly, biting at his twitching lips. The young went early to their beds, repelled by the strangeness of the night. When they were gone Jasper called Ellen with a dry toneless voice and when she came near the fireplace he said that he would have to go away, that he could not stay longer in that country.