Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  So great was the dog's uproar that Sober was breaking through the window with an oar before she heard. She watched him. He seemed like a figure in a dream. "You'll never make it with me an' Caesar," she said, and Sober answered in his usual sullen tone, "Ah made it once on th' Mississippi."

  She got up and stood by the window, but could only stare at the swaying boat. Sober steadied it with an oar, and called to Caesar, but the dog stood with his paws in the window and whimpered and looked at Delph. "You might at least think a him, if'n you care nothin' about bein' saved," Sober said, and sat waiting, unable to leave the boat and come to her.

  Then somehow her stiff cold body had climbed through the window and into the boat, and Caesar was sitting quietly by her feet. She watched Sober's face as he flung it forward low on his chest as if he prayed and then back with set teeth as if he cursed the sky, while his great shoulders and long black hands heaved and pulled against the flood. She pitied him. Sober seemed not to know that she belonged not with the living, but with the dead, but the river knew and would take her. When an ice cake or a log struck the skiff he would be with her, a dark shapeless nothing swallowed and forgotten. But Sober acted as if he could lift the river from its bed and set it on a mountain.

  They rode over Marsh's corn fields. Sometimes Sober fought to reach the river hill, but when the swift water threatened to swamp

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  the boat, he eased his strokes and floated with the flood that would, if he were strong enough and skillful, be made to take them to the lower arm of river bluff that circled Marsh's lands.

  Delph watched the bluff, a mountain of blackness in the moon shadow, grow gradually nearer, and felt no victory but a foretaste of sorrow and a loss greater than that of all her bright dreams for Marsh. While Sober rested on his oars again she asked, "Soberall thisit'll, wellit won't be so good for my baby, will it?"

  He looked over his shoulder at the nearing river hill and said, "It's comin' now, Ah reckin."

  She nodded and gripped the seat of the boat. "It's too soon," she said when she could speak again, "an' I don't guess it will ever."

  But her voice trailed away, and Sober answered nothing, only bent again to the oars.

  She heard men calling on the river bank, and saw rocks and trees outlined in lantern light. After that she was sometimes in an upstairs room with Caesar and the muddy water coiling to her chin, and other times she ran singing through the beech groves of the Little South Fork Country, but always there was pain. Hours of it that saw the lamplight change to daylight and the daylight fade and the light grow: yellow again.

  Then it was hard to believe that it was she who lay with closed eyes and wished for nothing except that all the people would go away. Someone was always in the rooma large room with pale green paper that made her think of spring and dark wood paneling that shone sometimes brown and sometimes red in the flickering light of an open coal fire. She recognized the room, and knew that her child had been born in the brick house.

  Mrs. Elliot came in and laid her hand on her head and said, "How are you, Delph?" And she answered, "I'm all right."

  Dr. Andy came with his quick cat like steps and said, "Quit worryin', Delph. He'll be fine an' healthy as his daddy, even if he did get a bad start."

  "I know," she answered, and wished they would go away. She wanted to think about somethingsomething she could not get out of her mindand it was not of Marsh somewhere in the back country hemmed in by roaring creeks and flooded roads. She closed her eyes again, and thought for a moment she was back in her own

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  house, in the upstairs with water rising over her feet; they were so cold, and her hands were cold, but her head and chest were hot like fire, and in her shoulders there were knives of pain.

  The pain startled her into wakefulness, and she wondered if the baby had come. She remembered that that was what she had wanted to think aboutit wasn't enough that her child must come too soon, but she must, even before it was finished being born, be a sickly, puny one who couldn't nurse and tend it as a mother ought.

  She heard talk in the next room, and held her mind like a kite tugging on a string, and listened. She heard Sadie Huffacre's loud shrill whispers, some talk about her baby; it wouldn't pull through, so Sadie said, and whispered on until some one silenced her with a low, "She'll hear."

  Somewhere a baby cried, a hoarse weak cry that drifted away soon with the women's voices. Then there was the sound of Katy's talking and chattering with Mr. Elliot. Katy had come by the same route as Dr. Andy over the railroad bridge and through the tunnel. But Katy had had excitement. Dorie had been so out of her head with worry for Delph and Sober Creekmore's family and not being able to rouse Mrs. Elliot by telephone, that she had given little thought to Katy and Katy's worries. So Katy had run away sometime about midnight and was scarcely over the Little South Fork when the pounding ice sheet sent the South Fork Bridge down the river.

  Delph heard and tried to make sense of the words, but she was cold again and shivering. Dr. Andy came and looked at her and smiled and she saw the trouble in his eyes. He had left those drowned in the Burdine bottoms and others sick with pneumonia from exposure to come to her, and now he didn't know but what his time was wasted, his eyes seemed to say.

  Sometime later, it might have been near sundown, had there been a sun, she heard Katy's cry of, "Here he is," and she wondered who it could be, but was too weary to bother. She closed her eyes and wished for sleep that would make her warm and take the river away.

  Some voice, hoarse and faltering, like that of an old man called, "Delph," and she opened her eyes. She saw a big strange man with red rimmed eyes and matted hair, and face and beard and clothing wet and splashed with mud. She pitied him. He seemed so cold, cold

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  as her self. He twisted a black felt hat in his hands, but crush the hat as he would he could not still the trembling in his hands.

  He looked at her, and she at him, and her pity died. He was broken at last. He stood there knowing now that all the things she had tried to tell him through the summer were true. She knew she ought to feel something, be gay as she had been when he asked her to marry him. She heard her baby's weak cry, and could feel nothing for herselfor for the man. The cost of his learning, if he had learned, had come too high.

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  18

  Next morning it was raining again, a slow cold drizzle that sheathed the fence wires in ice, and beaded the twigs of the trees. Marsh as he walked across his upland pastures from Higginbottom's where he had spent the bit of night that was left after coming away from Delph, felt rather than saw the icy rain. Though it was long past his usual breakfast time, the murky dawn seemed more the ending of night than a beginning of day.

  He walked slowly with his legs feeling curiously light, and his head, too; and his eyes felt strange as if propped open with sticks and sprinkled with sand. Still he wasn't sleepy. He wasn't tired or hungry. He felt nothing as he plodded through the rain. He reached the brow of the pasture hill and stopped and studied the brick house, but found only the upper windows yellow in the heavy gloom. Caesar came whimpering by his feet and laid his nose against his knees. Since the flood Caesar had somehow changed from an overgrown playful pup to a dog, given sometimes to wrinkling the brown spots on his forehead and talking with his eyes. When his master stood so long in the rain he cuffed a leg of his overalls and looked up at him, but Marsh continued to study the brick house windows with no glance for Caesar.

  When he had waited a time and the kitchen windows did not brighten, he swore a long bitter oil man's oath and went on over the hill toward his lower farm, stopping every step or so to turn and look back at the brick house until it was lost to his sight. None of them would be up till noon, he guessed, worn as they must be from caring for Delph and the baby. Dr. Andy had not started for Burdine and

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  his other patients until the small hours of the morning. But Delph would be all right he had
said. Pneumonia side by side with child birth was bad, but what would have killed another, Delph would throw off in a few weeks' timealready her fever was not so high as it had been. She would get along fineif she didn't fret herself to death over the baby. And Dr. Andy had spoken but briefly of the child. True, it had come only a bit too soon, but it was thin, not fat as he had expected the baby of a healthy young couple to be, and a child born from a woman with pneumonia must be bottle fed from its birth, and that was not a promising start for a delicate baby.

  Marsh thought of Dr. Andy's words and wished for some hard heavy work for his hands. At the spot where the road turned over the bluff, he stopped and tried to see what was left of his lower farm. Through the night the river had drawn almost to the willow trees, though pools of water in the fields shone dimly like black islands in the seas of yellow mud.

  He saw the toilet that had stood at the back of the garden face-downward on the other side of the barn. The chicken house lay in what had been the melon field. Rails and limbs of trees and paling slats were strewn about with the half of what must have the roof of a barn up the river, lying by an upper corner of the house. He saw wire fence broken and sagging under walls of dripping debris, and long stretches of paling flat on the ground or carried away.

  He looked a time in silence, then whistled to Caesar who had circled away, and walked on, and did not stop until he reached the house. He studied it a time; already the water-soaked weather boarding had loosened in spots, here and there were broken window panes gaping like torn eyes, stones in the foundation had slipped to the ground, and heavy layers of mud reached half way up the second story windows; but such things seemed no more than scratches on some battle scarred warrior. The house stood firm and true and straight, moved no whit from its foundations, with roof and walls and floor that showed no signs of sagging.

  He circled the tool house, the smoke house, spring house, and barn and found them in more or less the same condition; wounded but not mortally, showing the manner of men who made them and the good stout timbers that had gone into their making. The barn, standing as it did on the highest bit of ground had suffered least of

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  all. The hay and fodder stored in the loft were dry, though the hall and stables and pens were gutted of many of the things they had once had. He saw the new harness which he had bought with melon money and had somehow always hated, half buried in the mud. He saw his tools, and the bit of farm machinery he had, scattered about, covered with mud, or beginning to rust.

  He returned to the house and walked slowly through the rooms where water-soaked, mud-covered furniture lay fallen to pieces, wall paper weighted with mud dropped from the walls and ceiling with soft thuds, and the mud-covered floor was strewn with mud soaked clothing, broken dishes, pots and pans, and all the little articles of Delph's housekeeping.

  He hesitated a time, then opened the stair door, and after removing a chair and piles of wet bed clothing caught in the stairs he went up to Delph's room. He stood a long while and looked at the bed with Delph's chair and Caesar's chair fallen against the headboard. He studied the broken window, measured his height against the rim of mud on the walls and found it to his shoulders. He saw his papers and government bulletins safe and dry on the nails where Delph had hung them in towels and pillow slips.

  He went to the kitchen, and, after staring a time at the mud-covered stove and the pipe, its battered joints scattered on the floor, turned sharp about and walked away. He was just walking through the place where the front yard gate had been, when a woman called, "Oh, please, Mr. Gregory, I am afraid I need some help."

  He glanced up and saw Mrs. Elliot on the river hill, and she seemed to be burdened with a strange load for Mrs. Elliot. He wondered angrily what business she had walking down to see him in his misery; she had always looked to be such a useless, artificial sort of woman, always chattering about flowers or manicuring her finger nails or having her hair "done," that he had little use for her. However, he remembered that she would at least have some word of Delph and hurried up to her.

  She handed him the most of her load, a can of kerosene, a bundle of cedar kindling, cloths, reserving nothing more than some newspapers for herself. She chattered amiably as they walked down the hill. Delph had only three degrees of fever, and was much better than yesterday, asking about him and the baby and everything. Mrs.

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  Elliot had telephoned Higginbottom's to tell him how Delph was, but Lizzie had told her that he had gone off someplace with never a word of where he was going. She, Mrs. Elliot, of course knew that he had come by their place and finding them still all in bed, had come on down to his farm. She of course didn't know, but she bet he had come away without a bit of kindling, and that was of course the first thing he would have to do, start a firewasn't it?

  Marsh hesitated and stood staring at the wreck of all he had. "Sure, sure," he suddenly said, and went striding away so fast that Mrs. Elliot was hard put to keep up with him.

  It was a slow business, the scraping of mud from the stove, and was scarcely finished and the pipe up before Lizzie Higginbottom came. She was a plump, brown haired brown-eyed woman who reminded Marsh of a placid tempered brown leghorn hen. She had been a frequent visitor all through the winter, and usually came with a bit of her mending and a bag of the fat, clumsy sugar cookies she kept always baked for her boys. And through the whole of the community she was never known as Mrs. Higginbottom, but always as Perce's Lizzie, and not even Sadie Huffacre could quote a bit of gossip from Perce's Lizzie. Mostly, she quoted Perce, the Bible, and Brother Eli, and occasionally some bright remark of one of the boys or Little Lizzie, and she had never been known to give an opinion all her own on anything.

  Today she stood in the door, and quoted Perce, who had 'lowed that Marsh had gone down to his farm; it would be wet and muddy down there, and Marsh had eaten so little breakfast and slept not at all that he'd better look out or he'd be sick next, and he must eat and keep up his strength, so she had brought him some cookies and coffee and sandwiches. Perce said tell him he'd be down pretty soon. He and the boys wore still hunting two of his shoats; in case Marsh came to his senses and remembered he was a farmer with hogs and cattleand here Lizzie stopped for lack of breath. The stove pipe was not as straight as she liked, and she came and fixed it; that was Lizzie's way, so Perce always said. She never spoke her mind on anything, but if a thing were not done to suit her she did it herself.

  Perce and his boys, all walking behind like a flight of stairs, came soon with word of the shoats. They had been out scouring the country, and their eyes were big with wonder at the things they had seen

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  by the river, and the fearsome flood tales they had heard. A man up the Cumberland had had six cows drowned right in his barn; and less than eight miles away there was a woman and her two children drowned, and nobody yet knew how many were dead in the lower Burdine bottoms. Marsh, they said, was lucky, and so was Sober Creekmore. He had not come to do the milking that night because he had been too busy moving his corn and fodder up from his bottom fields. Still, he had not expected such a flood. His house was on a hillside, supposedly out of danger. It just happened that sometime in the night when Emma was sitting up in bed nursing her month old baby, she had looked out the window and thought she was seeing things in the moonlight. There looked to be a little barn or something right by their yard fence. She had wakened Sober and sent him to see.

  After that Sober had been too busy making shift for his family to think much of Delph until Emma remarked that the excitement she would maybe go through might be bad for the baby. And Sober remembered he had not seen her since morning. He had sent his childrenthey were all out up in the hill under a cliff anywayrousing the Higginbottoms and the Elliots to learn if Delph were safe. When he learned what had to be learned, he had kissed Emma goodbye, told her to pray, then taken his skiff, and with first his children and then the neighbors helping him, had carried it four miles up the river
in order to get it to the right spot above Marsh's land; for no man alive could have rowed up the Cumberland on that wild black night.

  Lizzie listened to the talk for a time, then reminded her boys that they would either have to get to work or go to school. They could all get hoes and start scraping mud from the floor, or they could start husking out the water soaked corn in the crib, or they could start washing Marsh's plows and other tools and machinery and get them in shape for oiling, but whatever they did they must get to work, or they would have to go to school. She, Lizzie, had to be getting back pretty soon for there was dinner to get, but first she thought she'd gather up some of Delph's clothing and bed clothing and see if it couldn't be washed and saved. It was too bad that Perce was so big that Marsh couldn't wear his clothing, but maybe she could find enough of his things about the house that could be washed and