“I’ve come to help you bring in the harvest.” Clyde stepped away from her, for the fact that they were alone together frightened him suddenly. He had no cause to be afraid of a girl, yet he was, and couldn’t say why. “Since your daddy’s off to jail and all.”
He had meant that last to stall her, to discourage her advance. But Beulah was unfazed by the stark absence of her father. She didn’t stop. She came very near Clyde, so he could see the redness of the skin between her fingers, the chafing from lye soap and hot water. She bent and began gathering cornstalks and bundling them into sheaves.
“Sorry my pa killed your pa.”
She didn’t sound sorry, and Clyde told her so, but he wasn’t exactly sorry, either. Mostly he was disoriented by the change and tired from the extra work, tired from Nettie Mae’s anger. And the memory of his father’s grave still clung to him, the dark place in the earth and the smell of heavy soil, the murmur of the river. The way Substance had locked his arms out to the side and resisted going down to his finish. The grave had upset Clyde; the grave upset him still. That was all—or at least, that was the better part of his anxiety.
Then Beulah spoke of Nettie Mae while she bundled the sheaves. The girl never looked up but went about her work methodically, as if Nettie Mae’s hatred for Cora mattered less than a spilled cup of water. As if a woman’s anger was of no consequence, or as if the girl thought Nettie Mae would forget all about it and let go of her rage with time.
Is she simple? Clyde wondered.
He watched Beulah lay the cornstalks out neatly on the dusty red ground, side by side. No; the girl wasn’t simple. She was dreamy and odd, no doubt, but Clyde perceived no lack in her wits. If anything, Beulah possessed an air of too much seeing, too much knowing. The girl seemed perfectly content with their situation, not, Clyde thought, because she was too foolish to understand the hardships both families faced, now that their fathers were gone. Rather, Beulah seemed to believe that despite the trials lying just ahead—the harvest yet to be gathered, and winter looming cold and barren, mere weeks away—everything would work out precisely as it should. The girl seemed so content, Clyde almost caught himself believing that everything had already sorted itself, just as it ought to have done from the very start of the year, from the start of his life.
Clyde shook his head in cautious wonder. Then he helped her tie the first sheaf with a green twist of cornstalk. They went on harvesting together—he cutting, turn and turn, pause, slide of stone along blade, and she placidly picking up stalks with the ears still attached.
It took Clyde half the corn patch to grow accustomed to Beulah’s presence. He had spent precious little time around girls, though he often encountered them in Paintrock on the days when he drove the cart to town to fetch the post and visit the general store. The girls in town giggled when Clyde walked by, and if he met their eyes or smiled at them, they would blush, or sometimes they would bunch together in little circles and whisper. Town girls had always put Clyde in mind of hens panicking when a hawk flies overhead, so after the first handful of baffling encounters, he had made it a point never to meet their eyes, so he wouldn’t feel obliged to smile. Sometimes it only made the girls giggle more when he didn’t smile. Beulah did not laugh, though, nor did she blush. Maybe town girls were different from prairie girls, Clyde thought—fundamentally different, the way the wild sheep up in the foothills were different from the docile creatures he bred on the farm. Still, though Beulah’s silence was easy and pleasant enough, somehow her calm acceptance of fate’s recent turn put Clyde on edge. He thought he might prefer town girls after all, if prairie girls were so immovable.
But by the time half the corn was cut and tied, Beulah had become familiar to him. He moved around her—with her—effortlessly, the same way he moved around Joe Buck and the other horses he trained. No need to look up. He could sense the other, feel her movements and her pace. She calmed him with her steady presence, just as he calmed his horses when a snake moved in the grass or when a sudden wind ripped down the steep flank of a mountain.
When most of the corn had been cut and the full heat of afternoon hung in shimmers above the pasture, the little children wandered over to watch Clyde and Beulah working. There were two small boys, both under the age of ten but too old for short pants, and a girl barely big enough to run. They stood toeing the edge of the field, shy of Clyde but visibly burning to come nearer.
“Keep your sister away from the scythe,” he told the boys. “But you can try it out, if you want to, one at a time.”
He showed the boys, one after the other, the right way to hold the scythe’s handle and how to swing the curving blade above the soil. How to keep the sweep of your blade level so you wouldn’t leave pointed stalks behind, which dried sharp enough to punch through the sole of a horse’s hoof. The boys weren’t any good at scything yet, but they would learn with time.
The woman Cora hung back, vivid and lovely with worry. Her face was colored like her dress, delicate rose-petal pink, and when she wrung her hands in fear for her children’s safety—in fear of Clyde, too, who after all was a Webber—the gesture was compellingly fragile. She wouldn’t approach the field, and when Clyde looked at her, Cora shifted on her feet this way and that and threw up her head in fright, as if she wanted to run.
“You’d best go back to your mother now,” Clyde said to the little children. “Beulah and I will finish up with the corn.”
The children scampered away.
Beulah called after them, “Benjamin, you bring us some bread and butter and water. We’re proper starved ’cause it’s all past noon.”
While he waited for the meal to arrive, Clyde swung his scythe again for some minutes, but he sensed a stillness behind him. Beulah had ceased to work. He let the blade fly to the end of its arc, then grounded it against the soil. He turned, panting, and found her on her knees beside a half-assembled sheaf. She had peeled back the dry husk of a loose ear of corn and was turning the ear in her hands, absorbed in the sight of those small, hard kernels.
Clyde lowered himself beside her, squatting on his heels. “If you don’t keep a-gathering, we’ll never finish the job.”
Beulah didn’t answer. She only raised the ear for Clyde to see. Her thin face was solemn with wonder, as if she were offering him a treasure of immeasurable value.
Clyde frowned down at the corn. The kernels had dented and begun to separate, showing the spaces between, the papery redness of the cob.
“Look,” Beulah said, almost scolding.
Somehow, Clyde had disappointed her. He had failed to see.
Confused, he shook his head. “I don’t—”
“You don’t see,” Beulah said, agreeing.
Slowly, she ran a finger down one row of kernels. Clyde tracked the movement of her finger, and wherever she touched, the kernels seemed more vivid, as if she had swept away a film of dust, revealing the luster of gold. Now he could tell that some kernels were minutely flecked with white, and some speckled with red as deep as garnets. They were beautiful.
“They’re alive,” Beulah said softly. “Isn’t it strange? Every one is alive, though they don’t look it, dried up as they are. And every one is different. Look at this one, here. See how the white and yellow are swirled together?”
Clyde couldn’t see the markings. At least, he couldn’t understand why the pattern on a corn seed ought to fascinate a girl so completely.
“There’s a whole stalk inside every kernel.” Beulah’s voice was low and soft, barely more than a murmur. “A stalk, and roots, and leaves, and another cob with its own seeds. And all of those seeds have more seeds inside of them. How far back does it go, do you think? Or how far ahead?”
When she looked up, her eyes shone with tears. They were tears of wonder, Clyde saw—not of sorrow or pain.
Had she never felt pain or sadness? Was suffering a foreign thing to this odd prairie witch? It was intolerable, that the girl should escape the confusion, the hurt of what had happened bet
ween their fathers, their families. The unfairness of it struck Clyde like an ax blow. Beulah’s loss was not as great as his, yet it was still a loss. Why ought she to be exempted from suffering, while he . . . he had been forced to plant his boot on his father’s chest and push him down into his grave.
“What you said earlier, about being sorry your father killed my father . . .”
Beulah nodded, waiting for Clyde to go on.
“It ain’t true. You ain’t sorry; I can tell. And it’s terrible wrongheaded to say things that ain’t true.”
“Should I be sorry?”
“’Course you should. A man’s dead. And it was your father as killed him.”
“Your pa wasn’t a good man.”
Clyde stood so fast that his head spun, and he had to lean on the handle of his scythe to keep from pitching over. “How do you know whether my father was a good man or not?”
Beulah twisted the ear between her hands. A few dry kernels slid from the cob so easily they might have been eager for it. Seed corn had never come loose so readily for Clyde; the cobs always blistered his fingers and left his skin cracked and stinging.
“I just know it,” Beulah said. “I also know you ain’t sad that your pa is gone, either.”
“I am, too.”
“You ain’t sad the same way my ma’s sad about my pa being locked up in jail.”
“Your pa’ll be back after two years.”
She smiled up at him and said with a tolerant little laugh, “Your pa ain’t gone either, Clyde.”
He stepped back—stepped away from her—gripping the handle of his blade. “You’re crazy, girl. Plumb crazy.”
“No I ain’t, and you know it.” She brushed aside a few fallen leaves of corn till the bare earth showed, dry and flat and waiting. “Come and see.”
Clyde didn’t want to go near her again. He didn’t want to look at her wrist or the certain, newly determined angles of her face. But she was watching him, waiting for him, and he felt foolish and weak for being afraid. He laid down his scythe and knelt near Beulah, but not so near that she could touch him.
The girl rested her hand on the soil for a moment, palm down, as if feeling summer’s remnant heat rising from the earth. Then she pushed a finger down deep into the dryness. Dust rose in a tiny puff, and it made Clyde recall incongruously the smell of lanolin hanging about his shoulders, the smell of springtime rain. Beulah dropped the kernel of corn into the hole she had made, then patted the soil flat.
“Buried,” the girl said, “just like Substance Webber. When the time comes—when the time is right—it will sprout again, like him, and live.”
NETTIE MAE
What needs doing cannot be stopped. The vines in the garden had dried, coils of green and gold. The time had come for Nettie Mae to gather the squashes and cure their skins before the rains arrived. Hard, smooth rinds could withstand any weather and would keep in the darkness of the long shed until spring. The drying down had come early this year, as with the fall-bearing sheep’s readiness for lambing. It was more work piled onto the usual chores of summer’s end, which was always the busiest time of year. But the seasons turned when they would, without regard for human preference.
As she cut the heavy striped squashes from their vines and laid them in her basket, Nettie Mae thought of Substance lying somewhere out there by the riverside, underneath the soil. The rot was on him now, surely, moving doubly fast—invading from the outside, seeping out from the inside of his heart. She might have mourned over the fact, might have felt fear at the image of the man she had married decomposing, softening and weeping like the bruised skin of a fruit. The terrifying abruptness with which life changed to death, integrity to decay. But Nettie Mae had known Substance far too long—endured him too long—to weep over the loss.
When she had harvested the last of the squashes, Nettie Mae hauled her heavy basket to the back stoop and sat in the morning sun to wipe down the fruits with vinegar. The light felt paler and weaker than it had for weeks. Dew still clung to the grass, filling the morning with an easy coolness that would be crushed and smothered by noontime. Beside the outhouse, the hollyhocks had faded. Drops of water gathered in the dimples of their leaves, sparkling as the sun climbed higher, treading its routine path across the sky.
From her place on the back stoop, Nettie Mae could see the Bemis homestead waking—finally, hours after any proper family ought to have been up and out of doors. The three little children tumbled out and ran about the yard, unruly as a pack of wolves. Nettie Mae could almost imagine she heard their shouts across the wide sage-dotted pasture.
Then Cora emerged. Even from far away, Nettie Mae could see that woman’s beauty. She wore a gaily colored dress, cut to show off a neat figure. But the woman’s timidity was plain to be seen, too. She took up her chores in a subdued manner, moving with hesitation even in her own yard, and Nettie Mae watched with avaricious interest. The slump of Cora’s shoulders, the slowness of her step, the incapability of managing and directing her own children—it all came to Nettie Mae across the fields like the smell of baking bread. Hungry, she watched as Cora grasped weakly at a life that slipped farther from her hands with each passing minute. She doubted whether Cora could see her. The colorless brown gray of Nettie Mae’s dress—undyed wool—blended with the sod bricks of the Webber house. She allowed her knees to ease apart as she worked, and lowered each squash into the depression of her skirt where it would be hidden from view, where Cora wouldn’t notice the flash of gold and orange and green and look across the fields to find Nettie Mae there, watching.
Each time Cora stumbled or moved too slowly to intercept a running child or a hen escaping from the yard, Nettie Mae’s face tingled with a flush of pleasure. She might have had no love left for Substance, and no inclination to weep over his grave, but he had been her husband. The Bemis woman had had no right to take him, no right to deprive Nettie Mae of whatever small comfort she received from the man she had married. The theft had made a permanent fire in Nettie Mae’s soul, and now, with the weight of the farm pressing down on her shoulders as well as her son’s, she had no intention of extinguishing that blaze. Like an engine, she needed the heat and the pressure to keep working, keep moving, keep living.
She never took her eyes off Cora unless it was to trickle a little more vinegar from the old yellowware jug onto her rag. Nevertheless, Nettie Mae was sharply cognizant of the Bemis children. Like fish in the shallows, they darted into view and away again, lively and small. Only three of Nettie Mae’s children had lived to that age, when they might frolic and play and know whatever small joys life permitted. It was one reason more to hate the Bemis woman.
The knuckles of Nettie Mae’s right hand stung with sudden force. She lifted her hand and examined it. The skin, always hard and rough from endless toil, had cracked. Through the pale gray of the callus, lines of vivid pink opened and burned. A minor wound, but vinegar had gotten inside, so it hurt big enough for a more serious injury. She pressed a dry corner of her cloth against the place and clenched her teeth, watching the children chase one another around and around the distant gray farmhouse.
It isn’t Christian, Nettie Mae thought with a surge of bitter guilt. It’s not Christian, to let a family in need go without. She knew it was wrong to leave her neighbors hanging at a loose end. But if the fire didn’t burn, then the steam would die back, and the engine would come shuddering to a halt. And if Nettie Mae couldn’t keep moving forward, what would become of her? What would become of Clyde? He was the only child God had allowed her to keep.
In time, the squashes had all been wiped clean. Nettie Mae tore herself away from the sight of Cora struggling over the chores, carried her basket inside, and lined the squashes up on the kitchen mantel. A few days resting above a nighttime fire would toughen their skins, making them resilient enough to last through the winter. Now the apples needed picking. The trees Substance had planted some seven years before had borne well this year, the first time they would yield a
proper harvest. The putting by of cider and preserves, of dried apple rings and thick apple butter, would keep Nettie Mae occupied for days yet to come.
By the time she’d carried the ladder and her bushel basket from the long shed, the day’s heat was beginning to encroach upon the pocket of coolness that hung around the base of the foothills. She could smell afternoon coming. The oaten heaviness of the air, the thick-porridge density of it, the way its odor of dryness and limpness sank down among fresher scents of green and dew and lay there, immobile as a dead thing. The insects had already begun to drone in the pasture, a long, unbroken hum of weary resignation.
She pulled her long skirt and petticoat up between her legs, tucked them into the waistband of her apron, and climbed up among the branches of an apple tree. The air was still soft and cool there, faintly damp, sugared by the apples’ ripeness. When she picked the apples from their boughs, the fruits parted easily from their stems, as if the tree were giving Nettie Mae what it had worked all spring and summer to create. Here, take it; take it all. The apples are yours now. They were generous things, those apple trees—peaceful and serene, sheltering, as the man who had planted them never had been.
She tossed the apples she gathered down into the bushel, listening to each round, solid strike of sound. Then her hand rested for a moment on the curve of a branch, and she froze. The bough was twisted there, forced down at a tortuous angle by some old slight, some unknown injury—the weight of winter snow or the ceaseless torment of wind. Nettie Mae looked around her in the filtered green light, following the route of each branch in turn as it angled suddenly, breaking from a smooth, easy path to bend this way or that. The angles were like scars, she realized—marks of agonies long gone by, the tree’s flinch carried out over months and years of growth, a memory of pain set permanently in the body of the living plant. All at once, her blood ran cold with anxiety. It was Substance who had planted the seeds, Substance who had tended the saplings as they emerged from the earth. Perhaps the saplings had retained some sinister trace of the man who had planted them. Taking him up like their roots took up water, exhaling his hateful words like vapor from their leaves. A breeze stirred the branches, and the tree whispered around Nettie Mae’s head. The hiss of it sent a dark and hopeless chill up her back.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow: A Novel Page 5
