Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

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  She started a letter to Mrs. Crouch in answer to the one she had received at Christmas Time, but the scratching of her pen on the paper sounded loud in the empty house, and when she had sat still a time in an attempt to collect her thoughts, the silence deepened until she could hear her breathing and her heart beating in her cars. She sprang up quickly, dressed for the outdoors, pushed the beans to the back of the stove where they could simmer with no danger of burning and went hunting Marsh in the woodlot.

  She knew it was silly to go running after him in the middle of the morning, as if she were some spineless wife who must forever have her man at her apron strings. Still, when she had thought it over as she walked along, she decided it wasn't Marsh she came to see, but the brick house and the upper farm, since she had never seen them except from the road. When she had followed the wagon track that twisted up the hill, she went first to the high knoll in the pasture, and stood among the leafless walnut trees, and looked out over the country. She could not see so far as on the hill at home, but so much farther than in the valley that it was like getting a breath of outside air after a long stay indoors.

  Behind her, east of the Cumberland were the last of the high back hills. West lay a farming country of gently rolling hills, much like some of the land on the other side of the river. She forgot Marsh for a moment in the excitement of looking at the new strange land. She knew that toward the west the hills flattened into the pennyrile, while north they crossed the knobs and became the famous bluegrass country where the homes were finer than castles, and even the negroes were richer than some of the poorer hill renters.

  She saw Cedar Stump School, an ugly, mud-bespattered one room building in unfenced treeless grounds on the other side of the creek from Marsh's lands, bleak and cold somehow like the rest of the country. The few farm houses she could see looked almost dirty against the dazzling whiteness of the snow, while the road to Hawthorne Town was no more than a narrow gray thread, its edges lost in red clay banks or buried in the snow.

  The red brick house, Marsh's house where the Elliots lived, was the only cheerful thing on the landscape. It was finer than she had imagined, larger, more gracefully built than the Fairchild Place; set in a great sweep of yard that in back dropped over the river hill and

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  in front swept down to the Hawthorne Road. The eight white columns of the wide front porch were graceful, fluted things, hinting of some fineness and freedom in living foreign to any that she knew.

  In order to see better, she walked nearer, first only to the orchard fence, but the trees kept hindering her vision, and so after a quick glance about to see that no one watched, she climbed the fence and walked up to a side gate in the yard. The place looked alive and warm with blue threads of smoke rising from its chimneys, and in a first floor window she could see bits of brightness that looked to be flowers. She stood in the snow and studied it all until a growing numbness in her feet reminded her that she had stood a long while in the cold gaping like a child. She was just turning away when she heard the notes of a piano, clear and gay, rising and falling in a laughing, tinkling tune, different from any she had ever heard.

  She couldn't leave the music; something about it matched something inside her, and it was like the tunes she knew existed but had never heard. She hesitated a moment, then walked to the grilled iron side gate, and followed a brick walk that led to the front of the house. She walked slowly, anxious to be within the sound as long as possible. Now and then she paused and pretended to look at something, so that if the strange northern woman should see her and ask her what she was about, she could tell her she only wished to look over her husband's property.

  The tune ended, but she walked on, hoping there would be another. She came to the window with the flowers, and stopped when she saw they were yellow roses, real ones in January. She had always known there were florist shops and hothouse flowers, but had never seen more than a carnation. She stood on tip-toe and was lost in the marvel of the roses in a silver bowl on the window sill. The flowers were too perfect, and for a moment she doubted their realness until she saw one yellow petal fall with a gentle deliberation as if the rose had felt her doubt and wished to show that it was real.

  She smiled at the window and the roses, for the window seemed less a part of a house than an opening into that mysterious way of life of which she had read in the women's magazines. The looped drapes of a cloth different from any she had ever seen and the fine, unbelievably thin, curtains seemed grand enough for the governor's mansion.

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  She was suddenly ashamed and confused and felt like a thief found stealing when a slender young woman with yellow hair brighter than Katy's hair lifted the curtain and studied her curiously. Delph knew she was the stranger, the mistress of the house. She matched the thin curtains and hot house flowers, and no woman native to the country, not even the well-to-do housewives on Burdine High Street ever wore silk in the mornings, or had pinky-white fragile hands like the ones that lifted the curtain.

  Delph smiled at the woman and was glad when she raised the window part way and she had an opportunity of explaining her childish gaping. "I was just passin' byan' I heard th' music an' saw th' flowers, so I thought I'd come a little closer. I'm Mrs. Marshall Gregory. My husband owns this place, you know."

  "Oh, yes," Mrs. Elliot said in a thin quick voice. "Your husband told me the other day that you knew a great deal about flowers."

  Delph laughed. "I'm afraid he bragged too soon. At homethat is down in Fincastle CountyI always had a lot of flowers, but just plain onesnothin' fancy like th' roses here."

  "Old fashioned ones?"

  Delph hesitated, not exactly certain what was an old fashioned flower. "Do you mean things like bachelor's buttons an' lady fingers an' marigolds?" she cautiously asked after a moment.

  Mrs. Elliot nodded and seemed delighted. "Those are the kind I want to grow. I've always thought a big old fashioned flower garden in the back here would go well with the place but somehow I've never been able to make them grow. I've studied several books on gardening, but last summer the garden was a failure."

  Delph studied the woman's hands, and wondered what she meant by gardening. Hands like hers had most likely never known the feel of a hoe handle. "I have some seed, flower seed that Juberhe was my uncle's hired manslipped into my things when I ran away. I'll give you some slips this springthat is if you'd like 'em."

  "Better than anything," the woman said, and invited her inside, but Delph remembering suddenly it was Marsh she had started out to see, shook her head. She was just turning away when Mrs. Elliot asked in her quick sharp voice, "Do you make nice firm yellow butter?"

  She whirled about and stared at the woman in angry puzzlement, of half a mind to ask her whose business it was what kind of

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  butter she made. "I wouldn't eat any but good butter," she answered after a moment's stony silence.

  Mrs. Elliot flushed and appeared confused as Delph. "I didn't mean thatbut some of the women about make scalded butter, and Mr. Elliot doesn't care for that. I'm sure yours is very nice, and I know I'll be able to use at least two pounds a week."

  Delph's look of angry perplexity grew. "I don't know as I'll be sellin' any," she said, and started away again.

  "But your husband said he wanted to sell me milk and butter and eggs," Mrs. Elliot called after her.

  She stopped abruptly as if a hand had caught her shoulder, swallowed something like anger or shame in her throat, and turned slowly back to the woman, managing a stiff smile as she did so. "Imy husband was tellin' me last night he'd made arrangements to sell milk an' butter an' such, but he didn't say to who. Soso when you spoke I didn't know it was you."

  The lie she knew was unconvincing. "That's all right," Mrs. Elliot said, and smiled on her kindly, pityingly it seemed to Delph as she said, "I know every one here is strange to youand that's never much fun." She took a handful of the yellow roses and handed
them to her, saying in her sharp, abrupt way, ''They help wonderfully to brighten things up a bit," and closed the window quickly, before Delph had time to protest or even thank her.

  She turned and almost ran to the pasture field; a dreary place where sage grass and blackberry briars gave the land a poor bleak look. She carried still the roses, held carefully from her as if they were a fire brand instead of flowers. When the brick house windows were hidden by trees and fields, she stopped and studied the roses. Then with a sudden gesture as if she threw a stone to kill a snake she flung them hard into the snow.

  "I hate her," she whispered, "so full of airs an' wonderin' if I make good butter." She looked at the flowers, and the flowers looked back at her. She knew she was childish and foolish and silly, but she didn't want to go bowing and scraping, carrying milk and butter and eggs to a neighbor's back door like a peddler woman. She walked on, slowly, until she heard the sound of Marsh's saw, a pretty sound it was like a singing in the sharp frosty air. He would be kneeling in the snow, with his hat pushed back, and his eyes bright and soft,

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  underlaid with smiles as they had been since he came that afternoon to tell her he would not go away.

  She stood a moment, listening to the sound, then turned and walked slowly back, careful to step in her tracks. The flowers lay as she had left them. She picked them up, and gently brushed the snow from each, then arranged them carefully in one hand. Marsh would like to see the roses, and he would be pleased to hear of the milk and butter and eggs she was going to sell.

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  During the wildest days of February when snow whirled on sharp biting winds, Marsh's blue jumper could be seen moving over the barren upland fields, bowed many times under great burdens; stones or loads of cedar brush, or the grass sacks filled with earth that he carried and threw into the yawning red clay gulches to hold the land. Seasoned farmers marveled at the work he did; no man in the country had ever taken the time and trouble to build a great lime kiln such as he built in order to have quick-lime for white wash and sprays.

  He worked like a man to whom all weathers were as a day in spring; feared snow and mud and cold for his animals but not for himself. Many nights he was silent by the table, eating the food Delph put before him, no longer praising this or that, just eating, then sitting a time by the kitchen stove. Soon, it was time to light the lantern and make the last rounds of the barn and chicken house with Caesar. After seeing that all was well he would return to the house and go to bed, and usually he fell asleep after a brief good night.

  He never complained of the weather, though the spring that year was a wayward giddy thing. In early March Delph picked wild greens on the hill fields and by the river, and Marsh sowed his grass and clover seed. April came with frost and snow. Anemones and liverwort stood wide-bloomed and frozen in the woodlots and on the hill fields that he had sowed to grass, Marsh found grass and clover seed sprouted and frozen. Delph's young chickens, hatched in early March, yipped all day with the cold, and though it usually meant

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  scrubbing the kitchen floor, she brought them sometimes to warm in the house. The young growing chickens would many times bring a look of pleasure into Marsh's eyes, often tired now, and showing signs of trouble.

  One Sunday morning Delph stood by him in the kitchen, and watched in silence while he cut a frozen peach flower carefully in half with his pocket knife. He showed her the tiny thing that was to have been a peach, dead now from the frost. She felt a foolish pity for the flower that only bloomed to die, but when she looked at Marsh's face she forgot the flower. ''Pshaw, there wouldn't ha been much fruit, anyhow. Th' trees are old," she comforted, and watched his face. And when his eyes continued dark and filled with trouble, she patted his jumper sleeve and said, "Well, at least it didn't get th' little chickens, an' my cabbage an' tomato plants are growin' like weeds. You've not seen 'em in two or three days."

  She led him to the dining room, unheated and empty of furniture except for a large homemade table and three hickory bark bottomed chairs that had been in the house when they came. The room was used mostly as a catch all for the overflow of the kitchen and barn, with a basket of eggs and a churn of cream in one corner, buckets of milk on the table, sacks of corn and clover seed, with watermelon and various other seeds stacked here and there. The boxes of plants were set by the windows, cunningly arranged so as to catch any rays of sun that might come through. Marsh stooped and gently touched the small fuzzy stem of a tomato plant, that though young had the good strong smell of a green tomato. He smiled on the shiny leafed cabbages, and said as he had often said in the first days of their marriage, "Aye, you're a wonder, Delph. There's nothin' you can't do from bakin' good corn bread to raisin' chickens."

  "There's nothin' that'll grow like a dominecker if you give it a good start," she answered, proud that he had praised her for even a thing that Fronie's hired girl Nance could do as well.

  He studied her face a moment with kind concerned eyes. "Delphyou don't mind, sellin' thingspeddlin' sort of, just this once.I know it's different from what you've been raised tobut." His tongue fumbled and halted as it always did when he tried to talk to her of money matters and his plans which he could maybe never meet.

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  But she only laughed at his foolish concern. "Mind? You know I don'tnow. I wouldn't mind to haul a load a watermelons to Hawthorne Town an' stand between th' cannon in th' fountain square an' scream 'watermelons' at th' top a my lungs."

  "You'd scandalize your Aunt Fronie if she ever heard of it."

  "Law, what do I care about scandalizin' Aunt Fronie, an' anyhow," she continued more soberly. "It's sort of fun sometimesto get away I mean. It's so quiet down in this valley, an'well, ever'body likes a change. At first, that is just th' first time, I didn't like to take Mrs. Elliot her things. Now, I'm always glad to go."

  "You an' Mrs. Elliot get along right well together," he observed.

  She nodded and her eyes brightened. "It's like she was sayin' th' other day, mostly we try to see which can ask th' other th' most questions. She's always wantin' to grow things an' goes at it so awkward like. She was raised in a city an' she's been to Europe, but I think from th' way she talks that when she married Mr. Elliot she was hard up."

  Marsh grunted, "She must ha been, marryin' th' likes of him," and turned away to look at his seed corn.

  "An' Marsh, she knows so much about music an' books an' such. I guess you've heard her play th' piano, an' she's always gettin' good music over th' radio, not a bit like what Hedricks get on theirs. It's fun to hear an orchestra, an' have her tell me what they're playin' an'." She stopped for it was plain that she talked to herself alone. Marsh stood with his hands buried in a sack of heavy white-kerneled seed corn, and in a moment turned to her with his cupped hands heaped with the grain.

  "You ever see prettier corn, Delph? I'll bet ever' grain of it sprouts. Dorie can certainly grow th' corn."

  She nodded, and looked at him, his rough hard hands, the worn blue cotton jumper, his prickly chin, reddish gold with a week's growth of beard, and his mouth, thinner and tighter than in the winter. She wished it were fall, and he had finished his first crop and learned what he must learn. He took no notice of her searching glance, but continued to look at his corn. "I wish to th' Lord this damned weather would let up so I could get some ground turned," he said, and after a last caressing glance emptied the corn gently back into the sack.

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  "You need a shave, Marsh," she said, and added after an appraising glance at his hair, "An' a hair cut too."

  He rubbed one bearded cheek as he stooped to look at the watermelon seed, and answered absentmindedly, "You go an' get ready for church. I can shave an' scrub all over while you're braidin' your hair.Are you goin' to sing a solo today? They seemed to like that one last week might well."

  She shook her head. "Marshif you don't mind I think I'll stay at home. It's a long muddy walk in this cold
misty weather."

  He turned abruptly away from the seed. "Aw, Delph. I don't want to go without you, an' I've got to go. Angus is goin' to take me someplace to see about gettin' a second hand disc. You'll be by yourself all day, an' Dorie's expectin' us for dinner."