Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  He had, after much urging from Delph, sold a good bit of her timber, but every penny that came from it had gone as a payment on the land. It seemed unfair to use her money for food and clothes; the land and its mortgage were in her name as well as his; and if her money must be spent it should go only for that. Money the Elliots paid as rent had to buy fenceit seemed he could never be done buying fence-tools, a bit of mending here and there, a roof for this or that; and many times it hurt to see a thing going month after month in need of paint or roof he could not buy.

  He went for weeks that winter, and hardly knew the feel of a dollar in his pockets, and all of January was a scurry to meet the taxes. He would not touch Delph's cash for taxes. There were times when he was conscious of the mortgage, smaller than it had been, but still standing like a threat to his land. But though he went in thrice patched overalls and shirts solid with patches across the shoulders and down the sleeves, the patches, and the mortgage, and

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  his empty pockets troubled him but little. He had Delph and he had Burr-Head and he knew he could farm.

  Many winter evenings when he was walking home from some work on the upper farm, he would stop at the top of the hill and stand a time, looking sometimes down into the valley, sometimes at his rolling pasture fields. In the valley the twilight would stretch quiet and blue and cold, but the snow on the higher land lay streaked with bloody crimson in the red sunset light, while the western windows of the brick house seemed set with jewels and gold.

  He would stand in the sharpening cold, feel the frozen snow crunch under his feet, and wait sometimes until the upper fields were quiet and blue as the valley. There were moments while he stood so that he felt the roots of his life, and the flower, and saw the fruit, clearly as he could see the apples on the sprouts he had grafted in the fall. It was good to look into the valley, see his house and barn and smokehouse, see with his mind and feel in his hands the things there that he and Delph had made and grown together; the great barn bursting with corn and hay and cattle, the makeshift crib he had made to hold his overflowing corn, the mountain of fodder stacked in the garden, the smoke house filled with ham and bacon and sausage and lard, the mounds in the garden that covered potatoes and turnips and cabbage because he had no cellar to hold it all, the attic with popcorn, strings of red pepper, sage, catnip, and dill hung from the rafters, an upstairs room weighted down with sweet potatoes cured to keep through the winter, the apples and the pumpkins and the pears buried away in the hay, the barrels of cider vinegar, crocks of honey and pickles, stacks of homemade soap, the spring house where canned goods and such were stored waiting for the cellar, the sacks of dried apples and peaches and fodder beans that Delph had made stored here and there because he had not room enough to put them. There were his hogs and cattle and mules, worthless now in dollars and cents maybe, but all the same they were hogs and cattle and mules and he had corn and fodder and hay to bring them through the winter. How with all that and with Delph could a man mind patched overalls and empty pockets?

  But finer than such were the things he could not see and could not feel with his hands, but a something he and Delph had made together as they had made the corn. There was the look in men's

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  eyes when he met them in church or at some store in Hawthorne, eyes that held little doubt, or suspicion, or wonder of what he could do. There was the eagerness of merchants to offer him credit when credit was hard to get, and the respect and the admiration of men like Ezrie the school teacher who asked his advice on the growing of corn or clover, or asked for the loan of a government bulletin.

  He knew triumphs of which he could never speak; not even to Delph; they were at once too little and too big. But it was sweet to think of the trip he had taken in the fall to Delph's timber lands a few miles east of the Little South Fork Country. He had spent two weeks there. Roan had come and shown him how to mark out trees for cutting and then gone home, but Marsh had stayed a time and worked in the timber.

  He'd been hard at work one day, bent over the end of a cross cut saw, when John came riding up on his big white stallion. John was never the man to beat about the bush or mince his words. He said what he had to say when he had dismounted and shook hands as befitted an uncle-in-law. He made no apologies for what he had said that day more than two years ago. Marsh was a stranger then; he, John, didn't know what he might or might not do. It took a while to know a man; and now seeing as how he knew him and being as Marsh would be in the country a week or so, he must come and spend at least a night at Costello's Place. Fronie would be mighty bad put out if he didn't come; she wanted to hear all about Delph and the baby. It would be a long cold trip just to ride over there and back, so why not come around on his way home, bring the wagon; Fronie had a deal of stuff she wanted to send Delph.

  He had gone with some misgivings but, though he was anxious to be home with Delph, he was sorry that the next day came so soon and he must drive away. He had never known such hospitality as Fronie's, forcing him always to eat more than he wanted, zealous for his comfort every moment of his stay, and because the night was especially cold Fronie directed Nance to slip and spread a feather bed over Marsh sometime while he lay sleeping so that he awoke all in a lather of sweat and fear, thinking the weather had suddenly changed and there would be another flood.

  Still, he had heard it said that hill people always gave their company the best they had, but he knew they did not always give such

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  floods of praise and admiration that spoke more clearly through their eyes than on their tongues. He was hardly through the door on the evening of his arrival and warming by the fire, before Fronie commented on his patches; and looked ready to faint with surprise when he only nodded in an off hand way as she asked if Delph had done the work. Nance was called in to see the marvel, and came drying her hands on her apron and declaring that she'd always said that if the right man got to Delph she would get over her flighty ways. Still, it was a wonder to think that hardly more than two years back she wouldn't so much as sit still and embroider, let alone patch. And all, including John, beamed on him as if he were the one to take the praise instead of Delph. And Marsh looked into the fire and tried not to show how much their talk of patches meant to him. He had always been proud of Delph's way of taking care of him. It was good to wear a neatly mended and carefully ironed suit of overalls to Town, different from his oil field days when many times a person had only to look at him to know he was a lone man in the world.

  He liked Fronie; she seemed such a good sensible, substantial sort of soul. He was half sorry that John insisted that he spend most of his time with him. But when he had tramped over his fields and listened to John's slow talk of farming and Juber's proud comments on a pretty bit of meadow land or a good looking heifer, he was glad he had gone. A man could learn much from John Costello. He had never read so many bulletins nor studied the business like some, but he did know how to raise corn and cattle and make hill side pastures almost as good as flat land.

  John made most of his money from the great droves of hogs he turned loose in the woods each fall and left to fatten on the mast, and then finished off on corn before he sold them. He, like Marsh, had a good bit of hogs and cattle he didn't care to sell because of the low prices, so he thought he would just hang on to them; it cost a man nothing to let his hogs wander in the woods. Marsh asked him what he thought a man like himself with no great reaches of timber land but with plenty of pasture ought to do in such times. John advised him to hang on, buy no more grown cattle to fatten but keep the ones he had and buy calves, all the calves he could get. They would cost him little or nothing to raise; cattle were good for the landnot like sheepand there was always the chance that prices

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  might go higher. He also suggested that he might, if he could get up the cash, get up a fair sized drove of hogs with plenty of old brood sows and late next summer drive them up into Delph's timber land. He, John, could sen
d one of his boys over to toll them together now and then, or some of the back hill farmers living near the land might be glad to look after them now and then for a hog or so to kill for meat.

  Marsh listened to the slow-worded advice and felt much at home with John. He was a straight thinking man, and no wishy-washy fool. He hesitated a time, then asked him how he had managed certain things such as the three-year high school John had forced the county board of education to put back in the hills, so that all country children might not have to stay away from home to go to high school.

  John smiled. ''Partly politics, partly hangin' on," he said, and went on to tell of how he had started talking up such a school the year he was married and became Delph's legal guardian. He had seen then that she was a smart child, better in her books than most. He had planned that she should go to high schoolhe had always thought he would have liked some schooling past the eighth gradebut he had seen, too, that it would never do to turn Delph loose in even a little county seat town. He'd always been afraid, he went on to say after a time, that Delph would go like the rest of his family and her mother and her people; go away for the pure love of the going. It was all right for some, butwellhe had never thought it would do for Delph; she was different. And he smiled a gentle, half-sad smile. "It's nice to think of her as a peaceful settled married woman with a child, 'stead of a hot headed girl liable to do anything," he said.

  And Marsh knew that he had found a friend, a man who might be backward in his ways, hidebound in his politics and religion, but a man who understood better than anyone else in the world, maybe, that Delph had not changed from the old Delph into the new without a bit of struggleand that she was worth all the hurt, and fear, and patience, and anger any man would have to wade through before he found the Delph she was meant to be.

  He never told Delph of his talk with John or mentioned Fronie's praise of the patches. There was so much else to talk about when he got home. They sat half the night by the fire talking of this and that:

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  Delph asking another question before he had had time to finish the last one. When Juber came the previous winter she had felt too sick and troubled for Burr-Head to talk much with him, but now she could not learn enough of the doings of the ones in the Little South Fork country. Did Juber still court Mrs. Crouch and had Lucas Crabtree ever got saved, and how were the Hedrick girls? And did he recollect to get Fronie's recipes for spiced peaches and corn relish?

  When he produced the recipes, Delph studied them and smiled and looked into the fire and nodded her head as she did when wrapped in some pleasant thought or plan. Sadie Huffacre most generally, she had heard it said, took off most of the pickle prizes at the Fair. Well, she, Delph, was going to see what she could do. This would be their first year at the Fair, and they must show Westover County what the Gregorys could do. Solomon and Burr-Head could of course be counted on to take first prize in their respective shows, but they must show some other things as well.

  Marsh wondered if he dared exhibit corn in the face of Dorie and some of the other great corn growers in the county, and thought that maybe, for at least the next few years, he would content himself with showing hogs and stock. It was pretty well agreed that Solomon and Prissy were among the finest cattle in the county, and his hogs, though not purebloods, were among the best. But he had no sooner got into a good way of thinking on the Fair than Delph's mind as always went racing past him to more distant things. It pleased him to hear her talk of their future together on the farma thing she had never used to do. When she talked of the brick house, wondered how it would seem to live on the hill, near the road and close to school for Burr-Head in a house with electric lights and a real bathroom, he smiled and agreed with her that it would be a very fine thing.

  It seemed sometimes that the night when they had sat and planned for the Fair was no more than a week gone before Burr-Head was learning to talk, Prissy was having another calf, Maude was being bred again to Perce's stallion, spring was coming on; then summer with Poke Easy home for his last vacation, with his state bar examinations behind him and work with Joe in Chicago ahead.

  Dorie came often to see them that summer. Though she never spoke of Poke Easy or of Katy, going next fall into her last year of high school, she had a lonesome look sometimes when she played

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  with Burr-Head. Delph, too, would think sometimes of the last of the Fairchild children going away, and have a moment's loneliness and a lost feeling of being shut away from the brightest bit of the world she had ever known. Katy now talked less of the life about her with its possibilities for pieces in the paper than of what she would study in college, and the still more exciting topic of just where she would go to college. Poke Easy said he would like to have her with him in Chicago for he didn't want to live with Joe; and Emma, making more money than she had ever made, invited her to New York. She and Delph would sometimes study college catalogues together, and always Delph thought she should go to New York. Katy could come home then and tell her how it was.

  But Delph forgot everything and everybody, including Katy, in the excitement of getting ready for the Fair. There was so much to do. The season was a busy one; gardening and canning and pickling and drying, and Burr-Head always tempting her to forget her work and play with him. He was never a clumsy, whining, everdemanding baby. By the time he was eighteen months old he could run about and amuse himselfwith no help from his mother. Caesar had never approved of his bold, unbabylike ways, and more and more as he grew older, more given to wandering the far corners of the yard and even into the garden if the gate were open, Caesar neglected Marsh at work in the fields to keep an eye on Burr-Head.

  Nor was Caesar the only one. It seemed to Delph sometimes that the whole neighborhood would have liked Burr-Head for their own. Emma's youngest ones were always running away from home to bring Burr-Head crackled meat skins; a food of which Delph did not quite approve and Burr-Head was very fond. He always received a royal welcome at the school or store, in church and at the neighboring houses, especially at the brick house where Mrs. Elliot kept a bunch of toys for his pleasure.

  But Burr-Head with his red-brown curls and freckled nose that wrinkled when he laughed, was a strangely self sufficient baby with little need of toys. Sometimes Delph wished, and she knew it was a wicked wish, that he would beg to be carried or cry sometimes to sit in her lap, or cut a great shine when she had to leave him at Elliots while she rode to the store, or in church when he sat back with Marsh and she sang in the choir. He seemed almost as contented

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  with Marsh or Caesar or Mrs. Elliot as with herand he would stand for minutes together, peeping through the fence into the barnyard, smiling on and talking over many matters with the hogs and cows and chickens.

  Still, she knew she ought to be proud to have such a good baby; she could never turn out the work she did if he always hung about her legs and cried like some. And when the day of the Fair came at last, there he was standing good as gold on the hot crowded platform, not a bit put out by the judges and all the press of people. His eyes a bit bigger and grayer than common, and his hair curly as a sheep's wool from the heat. She didn't stand up on the platform with him and hold his hand or keep him on her knees, the way most of the mothers did their one and two year olds. She thought he'd manage better by himself, and though she was neat and clean as always, that morning she'd been so worried for fear Burr-Head would get himself dirty, and hurrying, too, that she had put on the first clean dress she came to, and hardly noticed until Marsh said as they were driving up the hill, ''Delph, you ought to have dressed up a little, too, wore that pretty red linen or somethin', 'stead a that old brown cotton."

  But she only laughed. It didn't seem to matter what she wore. The dress was three-year-old voile, one she'd had when she married; faded a bit across the shoulders, and tight, too, tighter than a voile ought to be. Then she forgot the dress in the excitement of the day. Her pickles won, and so did her spiced peaches, an
d so did her plymouth rock pullets, and then it was Burr-Head's turn.