Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  She shook her head, and looked at him with warm eager eyes. "Things couldn't be that would make me sorryever."

  He pulled a splinter from the rail and stared at it. "Aye, Delph, it's a long road you've got ahead. I can't see it, an' you can't see it, but it's there a layin' a waitin'." He looked slowly over her face; his eyes lingering on it feature by feature. "You know so little, Delph. I wishnow, I can sorta see why people cry at weddin's. It allus seemed foolish 'til now."

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  She patted his shoulder. "Pshaw, Juber, don't carry on so. Marsh, he'll take care of meif I need anybody to do that."

  He continued to study her; his face made her think of John's when he talked to the people in church, sober and filled with solemn thoughts. "Delph, I reckin you feel so, wellsomethin' th' way Enoch felt when he walked with God.But someday that'll wear off. It not in th' nature uv things fer it to lastth' way it is now. An' thenI'm not sayin' you'd forgit, everbut then there may come times, mebbewhen you'll have to recollect an' remember always that you come a good blood, oldest an' finest to these hillsan' a body can't go back on their blood. Wildness runs in some a your kin mebbebut not goin' back on promisesever. An' you'll never need strange laws or people to tell you what's right an' what's wrong. You'll know."

  "I'll be good. I'll write." She sat on the top rail and looked at him a moment longer, then sprang to the ground and hurried away. Once, she turned and looked after him, but he was walking up the pasture hill, his hat still clutched in his hand, and his white thin hair ruffled in the wind. She wanted to call to him that the wind was cold, but the words hung in her throat.

  She walked on, through a clump of cutleaf beech and prickly holly bushes where the jagged leaves caught at her coat and hat. The path twisted suddenly, and there was Marsh, looking just like Marsh in his old leather jacket and the battered black felt hat twisted in one hand. "At first I thought it wasn't you so dressed up an' all," he called, and hurried up the path.

  "I wanted to look nice walkin' to my weddin'," she answered, and tried to walk to him with proper slowness and decorum but somehow she was running and so was he, and she never knew whether she reached for him or he for her. It didn't matter. He was there and kissing her, telling her not to be afraid. "You've been gone so longtwenty days it wasyesterday," she whispered. "I was worried until I got your letter."

  "Dorie was behind in her corn gatherin' an tobacco strippin', an' I had to wait for Roan. An' what's twenty days?" he said, and kissed her again and smiled but there was something somber, troubled in his smile. "You knew I'd come back. It was like th' head part a meOh, Delph, what's th' use a talkin' Roan Sandusky is waitin' by th' road for us in his car. We'd better be goin'."

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  She made no move to go, but stood a moment longer in his arms. "Marsh, you're not afraidor thinkin' maybe thatwe ought to a waited."

  He pushed her hat back so that he might better see her eyes. "No, Delph, I'm not afraid, of anythingnow. It's just that I was worried you might bean' sorry, too, sometime."

  "Ever'thing will be all right. There's nobody out to see. I think Uncle John went cattle tradin' in th' other direction. An' it's so cold an' windy most people are sittin' by their fireslike them at home."

  "Why, Delph. You're cryin'."

  "No, I'm not."

  He patted her shoulder, and when she stood with bowed head and made no move to wipe her eyes, he pulled a red bandanna from his jacket pocket, and dabbed at her face. The handkerchief smelled strongly of fresh raw tobacco, and the rank unaccustomed smell caused her to sneeze. "It's just that I'm takin' a little cold," she said, and managed a shaky laugh.

  "You're a brave one," he said, and in spite of the rough brushy way they walked hand in hand. Marsh comforted her, talking in the rough excited whispers of a child. "Someday, we'll come back, Delph, an' mebbe even John he'll be proud you married me, an' not thinkin' as he thinks now."

  She laughed and wondered how she could have cried. "What do you care about John?" she asked, and was eager again, looking ahead to see the car. She saw it soon, a badly outmoded touring car with a convertible top and windows of yellowed, crackled isinglass. Such an ugly thing, and she thought she would remember and love it always.

  Her heart thumped in her ears and her scalp tingled with excitement, when Marsh bade her wait behind a tree until he should see that the road was clear. There were so many questions she wanted to ask him; where in Tennessee would they be married, and would this car take them there, or would they go on a bus or train? She wished for a peep at the wedding ring, and wondered if they would spend the night in a hotel. It would seem strange, sinful somehow, to stay the night with a man in a hotel, even though the man were her husband. Husbandshe whispered the word and thought of Juber's solemn face, and tried to think exactly what it was he had said about always and never turning backalwaysalwaysuntil she died

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  that was a. Then Marsh was motioning her forward, helping her down the bank, racing with her across the road.

  A long brown bony hand opened the car door, while its owner said in the tone of a hill man speaking of the weather, "Well, I'm right glad to see that nobody's shot." He pulled his tall thin body farther over on the seat, smiled at her with calm brown eyes, and asked, "Is this th' girl?"

  "Delph, this is Roan Sandusky, th' county agent over in Westover. I guess maybe you've heard of him. He's a friend of Dorie's an' went to school with Sam."

  "I've read of you in our county paper," she said, and smiled. She hoped that sometime she might see him again, and he would tell her about his life in college, and the two years he had spent in Europe. The paper had told of that, though from the looks of him a body would never have known he had been any place.

  Marsh sprang into the car, slammed the door while Roan began the business of getting out of a mudhole. Delph shivered and wished they would be gone. It seemed to her that the car made an uncommon amount of noise, and must be drawing the attention of all people for miles aroundJohn might have ridden down this way instead of the other. "You stopped in a kind of unhandy place," she observed.

  Roan sent a spray of tobacco juice out the window, smiled his brief crooked smile and said, "I parked in a mud hole on purpose; in case anybody come by askin' what I was waitin' for I could say, 'I'm stuck in a mudhole.'"

  Delph started to answer, and could not when as the car made a sudden backward sally, her head was jerked violently forward. Roan stuck his head out the window, and with much twisting and turning of the steering wheel, craning of his head, consultations with Marsh whose head was out the other window, and indescribable squeaks, coughs, shivers, and gasps on the part of the car, they were at last free of the mudhole and bumping down the road. "That's that," Marsh said. He fastened the flapping curtain and turned to Delph. "Scared?" he asked, but she shook her head and smiled with warm eager eyes.

  Soon the places she had known were gone, and they were on the county seat pike. Once, she tried to look back, but could see nothing

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  through the yellowed isinglass. Marsh whispered, "We're safe now." She smiled, but it was strange and a bit disappointing to know that the runaway she had thought on and trembled over for days was finished so easily and so quickly. For the first time she thought of her clothing, but found it carefully stowed on the back seat. Marsh followed her glance, and apologized for the rumpled condition of her dresses, "But soon as you get to Dorie's you can straighten ever'thing out," he said.

  "Dorie's?" she asked, while Roan laughed and said, "I take it she'll be in th' ceremony. You might tell her a bit a your plans."

  "I meant it as a good surprise," Marsh answered, and squeezed her hand while he went on to explain, "Dorie begged me to bring you down, an' anyhow they've changed th' marriage laws in Tennessee, so wherever we went we'd have to have somebody to swear you're twenty-one. An' Dorie said she'd fix it up with th' county clerk." He waited, but when she had continued sometime silent he went on excitedly, "We'll be married
in her house, Delph, with people we knowa littlealmost like bein' married in a home of your own."

  She nodded slowly, and looked steadfastly at the road. "Yesit will be somethin' like bein' at homeI guess."

  He gave her shoulder a quick hard hug. "Say somethin' besides 'Yes! I thought you'd like it a lot. II somehow couldn't stomach bein' married in a courthouse by a justice of th' peace or somethin'."

  "It will be soso lovely," she said. "I hope we won't cause Mrs. Fairchild too much trouble, stoppin' with her before we go on," she said, and sat and watched the bleak new country and thought of Dorie Dodson Fairchild.

  Instead of taking the roundabout way of the county seat pike by which they had come, Roan took a shortcut by a little used back road. They drove through the southeastern tip of Westover County, a poor land of low steep limestone hills, sparsely inhabited, with no wide bottom lands for corn, or smooth hill side pastures like those of the Little South Fork Country. The few houses along the road were small things, mostly of logs or poles, usually porchless, scant windowed, set on steep hill sides, and under many of the high cedar post foundations hogs grunted and shared their shelter with hounds and hens. "This place makes me ashamed to be out a th' hills,"

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  Delph said, as they bounced past one that looked to be little more than a roofed box of poles.

  Roan eased the car into a chug hole and studied the house with something like despair or anger in his dark brown eyes. "Looks like a body could begin to see some change in one county where he's worked eight years, but God if I cansometimes I think things look worse."

  "Some a th' back hill people will hardly listen to anything," she comforted.

  "They've never had many botherin' to tell 'em," the county agent answered, and frowned at a thin-sided, brindle cow in a muddy pole pen. The cow stared at them dully a moment, then went back to the few corn husks scattered in the mud.

  "She's cold," Marsh said, and twisted around and looked at the cow's long coarse hairs lifted along her back against the cold, and the shivers that convulsed her hollow flanks and rib-ridged sides.

  "She's lived through four winters in that pen," Roan said. "I guess in all I've spent a good week talkin' to th' man that owns herbegged him to build a pole stable, then begged him to let her range.Too much trouble to hunt her, he said, an' he had no fence. Worst thing is that cow's got TB. Th' man's got four kidsan' what can I do? Nothin' by God."

  They came to an especially rough bit of going, around and down a long ridge side that dropped into a narrow gulch-like valley, filled with slender second growth poplar and maple. Roan drove slowly with his eyes on the valley. "Look, Marsh, I can recollect when that was all burned off, clean as a hound's tooth, th' ground beginnin' to wash. In fifteen more years that'll be a pretty stand a poplar. I brought a bunch a school boys out to look at itnearly ever' one went back an' planted some poplar on his own land."

  "I wonder will they stay to see 'em grow?" Marsh said. He looked at the young growing trees, their blunt twigs faintly silvered in the deepening dusk, and his eyes made Delph think of Juber's eyes when he played his fiddle, gentle somehow and filled with an old man's dreaming; only Marsh was no old man.

  The going grew gradually easier; lengths of wire fence flashed by the road, with sometimes a gate, a corner of a substantial barn or dwelling rising for an instant out of the darkness; enough to show

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  that they were free of the back hills. Soon they were on a narrow concrete highway, unrolling over almost level farming country; a land of great barns and silos with fodder shocks marching away into the night, and here and there the dead suckered stubble of a last summer's tobacco field. They passed a filling station, then a small building, bearing a large sign, "Salem Ky. Post Office." A few minutes later Roan said, "Well, here we are," and turned into a graveled sideroad after pausing long enough for Marsh to spring out, and run to open a white-painted barnyard gate.

  Delph caught glimpses of a low stone fence covered with myrtle and leafless honeysuckle vines, the trunks of white pine trees, and a black iron hitching ring boy with an iron wreath in each hand. Two wildly barking black shepherds rushed to meet the car, then went dashing back to Marsh who had remained to fasten the big gate. Roan stopped by the yard gate, and somewhere a girl's voice shrilled in high excitement, "Angus! they've come. He got her all right."

  A tall young girl with a black wooly pup under one arm and milk bucket in her hand came flying into the band of light from the car. She tossed back her flock of poplar-leaf yellow hair, shaded her eyes with her hand, and came on, talking all the while. "We're behind with ever'thing tonight. Mama had to go down to look at one of th' renter's mules. They think it's goin' lame. I've been helpin' Angus with th' milkin', but th' barn's in such an uproar th' cows'ull hardly give their milk down.Where are you all anyhow? I want to see Delph."

  "I'm climbin' out of th' car," Delph called, eager to see more of the girl and go into the Fairchild house looming up in the early darkness. The porches were flooded with light, electric light such as city people had. She wished it were day, and she could see more of the place. The house looked large and fine with wide stone chimneys rising up against the sky, and the white columns of the front porch shining so proud and high. She thought for a moment of all those young ones who had lived in the house and then gone awaySam in New York, Emma who wrote letters to the county paper and worked in Chicago, Poke Easy in college studying law, Joe a lawyer in Chicago, and two other girls married well off she had heard.

  Then Katy and Roan and Marsh with the dogs were all crowding round, and Katy was dropping the milk bucket and shifting the

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  pup to her other arm in order to shake hands, introducing Brown Bertha and Black Peter, the pup's mother and father, declaring that Caesar the pup was going to be the death of her.

  "Now, what's my dog done?" Marsh wanted to know, and took the young dog, who thudded his tail excitedly and licked Marsh's chin and tried to get his hat between his teeth.

  "He can't get over th' notion he's a Spanish bull fighter," Katy sighed, and plunged into a long recital of the trouble and excitement he had caused that afternoon. He had always been a mighty one to growl and ruffle his hair when Solomon the prize bull bellowed, but this afternoon what he had done had capped the climax. He had slipped off to the barnyard, and when Angus the hired man was driving out Solomon, Caesar had dashed between his legs and caught the bull by the tail. The whole barnyard had been thrown into an uproar, while Caesar rolled back his eyes and hung on and Solomon pawed and bellowed and pranced. Caesar had held until he could hold no longer, and then leaped away with Solomon's horns just missing his belly. Now Solomon was wild; just listen to him roar.

  Delph tried to share the interest of the others in Solomon, but she wished they would go into the house. The long ride in the unheated drafty car had chilled her to the bone. Not only the ride was the cause of her shivers, but she, when dressing for her journey, had as one last gesture in defiance of Fronie, left off the winter underwear her aunt had made her wear. Now, as she stood in teeth chattering misery she thought of the discarded clothing with more longing than disdain. Though a northerly west wind tore through her tightly wrapped coat, she stopped with the others when Marsh sniffed the wind and said, "To my mind we can start strippin' tobacco again by tomorrow."

  He stopped then to study the stars, pale tonight and smudged in spots by thin streamers of torn, gray-white cloud. The North Star was hidden, and the seven stars were dim, but there was the Big Dipper, and farther west and lower lying, a bright star burned, the evening star, he guessed it was. He felt Delph's hand, timid, yet somehow assertive as it touched his arm. "Don't you like to look at th' stars, too, Delph?"

  She shivered. "Y-e-es, but they're not so pretty tonightdim an' little somehow."

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  ''I didn't mean prettybut wellthey're one thing a man can look atan' know they'll never change an' never go away,'' he said in a low voice a
s if it were a secret he wanted to share only with her.

  "But we'll see different ones in South America," she reminded him, and marveled that she was such a lucky oneto go so far that even the stars changed. She started to ask him exactly where they would go and when, but stopped, for he was talking again with the others. All were wondering if the wind wouldn't shift south as well as west and blow up a warmish rainthat would make fine tobacco stripping weather. Katy began begging Roan to stay the night and not drive on to his office and home in Hawthorne Town. Dorie would love to have him stay and take a look at the grading in the morning. Delph listened to it all in silence, and felt a prick of loneliness when Marsh turned away and went to the barn with Angus and Roan, talking with them of the tobacco market as if he had forgotten he had a bride.