Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  She tried him once with poetry, one Sunday afternoon when Burr-Head was between two and three. They were setting by the river, resting in the shade. Delph had a collection of poems, a book that Emma had sent her; for Emma sent or brought her many things, as well as the map of fairyland and that of New York City. She found a poem she had long wanted to have in a book of her own, and because she liked it so, she begged Marsh to listen. He lay with his head in her lap, his hat pulled over his eyes, but not too much but that he could see his fields of corn. Delph read:

  The blessed damozel leaned out

  From the gold bar of heaven;

  Her eyes were deeper than the depth

  Of waters stilled at even;

  She had three lilies in her hand,

  And the stars in her hair were seven.

  Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,

  No wrought flowers did adorn,

  But a white rose of Mary's gift,

  For service meetly worn;

  Her hair that lay along her back

  Was yellow like ripe corn.

  Marsh shook his head impatiently. "That don't make sense, Delpha pretty woman's hair th' color of corn."

  "But, it says yellow, sillyyou know, like gold."

  "Oh," he said, and felt uncomfortable, and restless at mention of yellow corn. He would have no yellow corn on his land, not even in the garden for fear that it might mix with and spoil his white.

  Delph read a few words more, but stopped when Marsh, his head filled now with thought for nothing but corn, lifted on one elbow

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  and looked out across the fields. ''I thought I saw somethin' like smut on that stalk over yonder," he explained and threw a pebble to indicate the direction, then settled back to listen, but he was restless, twisting his head about to get all possible views of the corn.

  Delph stopped and studied him. "You don't like it very welldo you?"

  He looked up at her and smiled, teasingly from the corners of his eyes. "I can't say that I do," he said, and then was troubled by the disappointment in her eyes and a loneliness that came sometimes when she listened to the radio. "Pshaw, Delph," he comforted, "I'd like it if there was any use, but what in th' hell do I need with poetry anyhow?" and he lay with his head in her lap and looked out at his fields of corn and listened to their whispering.

  Delph read again, but silently now, and after a time she let the book slip down on Marsh's head. He never noticed. He was sound asleep like Burr-Head. Caesar alone kept her company, lying with his nose on his paws, and studying her with his great brown eyes.

  She sat a time and watched the sleeping ones, then began the tedious business of getting Marsh's head from her lap to the ground without waking him, but he gave a violent snore and then a long drawn "G-e-e-e," that threatened to wake Burr-Head, and caused Caesar to spring up and stand above him wagging his tail. Delph left him as he was, and sat and watched the evening shadow creep over the corn fields.

  She had never grown accustomed to the shadows creeping over the bottomlands and plunging her house into a twilight when the afternoon was little more than half gone, and there were times yet when she lifted her head from some work she did and felt the stillness of the valley like some heavy air that choked her as she breathed it. But more and more when the twilight seemed too long and blue and the silence like a ringing in her ears, she would think of the brick house. It would be good to have a kitchen window from which she could see the sun go down, and other windows that looked out over the country.

  She smiled a little at her silly, dreaming ways. Shadows and low land could not hurt a body; Burr-Head was healthy as if he lived on a hill. It was the poetry, she guessed, that made her so, twisting and tearing herself apart like that summer after Burr-Head was born. If

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  she had no books and no radio she could maybe be always contented as the cows and Lizzie Higginbottom.

  For the moment she was glad that Marsh slept with his head on her lap; she could not slip away and listen to the music as she had meant to do. Sometimes the music she heard seemed like so many tongues of the world calling to her, begging and crying the way the wind and the moonlight and the flying leaves had used to do at home. Not the world of which she read in magazines and papers, or of the bright new cities in the north built of iron and tin and steel where the young ones out of the hills went to work in offices and factories. Since living near Burdine she had known many such who had gone away; some to good jobs like Doric's children, others to factories like Vinie; and none of them, she knew, had ever found the world of which the music cried. The world behind the iron and tin and steel, the same old world that tempted Azariah and the others to go on until they died trying to learn the look and the feel of the land over the next hilland learning whether or not they could reach the next hill.

  Marsh roused and smiled at her. "That was a fine nap, Delph, but Lord whyn't you push me off a your knees? I'll bet you're tireder than if you'd worked, an' it Sunday."

  "I tried it an' you started plowin' th' mules enough to wake Burr-Head," she said, and they both laughed, and neither noticed when the hill shadow crawled to Marsh's feet. He was calling her stingy because she insisted on saving all the money that had come from her mother. He wanted her to buy a pianoshe would like that so, and Mrs. Elliot had said many times she'd like to teach her to play.

  But Delph shook her head. She was saving the money for Burr-Head's education, she said, and anyway she didn't want furniturenow. She could not forget the flood. Many nights in winter she saw the water as she fell asleep, and would lift wildly on one elbow, only to find Marsh sleeping quietly by her side. There was another reason why she did not want a piano, though she never spoke of that. Now, when she went to the brick house she seldom touched the piano keys as she had used to do, or maybe sit down and try to ripple out a tune when Mrs. Elliot urged her.

  Her hands were so big and brown and strong against the whiteness of the keys; and in their movements they were beginning to be

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  the hands of a farmer's wife. Their skill now was for washing and cooking and tending things; milking the cows and slopping the hogs when a press of work held Marsh late in the fields, keeping her garden free of weeds, gathering corn on bright fall days when it was more fun to be out in the fields with Marsh than working in the house. When she sang she thought sometimes of her hands; what had gone from them would maybe reach her voice.

  Still, she didn't mind. Nobody ever heard Delph Gregory complain, not in nagging, scolding ways. She had a tongue too fiery for simple quarreling. Westover County had never heard a better calling down than she gave Sadie Huffacre the winter Burr-Head was a year old. Sadie had been telling for months that through the previous summer Marsh and Elliot's hired girl Vinie, before she went back to Cincinnati, had had such goings on. She, Sadie, had seen them once by the river and again in Hawthorne Town. Delph got wind of it through some careless remark of Katy's, and the next time she saw Sadie, which happened to be as she was riding to the store, she dismounted then and there and such a talking to as she gave the woman. Sadie had backed herself against the fence across from the store, and looked ready to drop through the ground, and only stuttered like a deaf mute when Delph dared her to say that it was true.

  Most agreed that it was a spunky but risky thing for any woman to do. What if Marsh had been seen with Viniewhere there was a lot of smoke there was bound to be a little fireand Delph would be the laughing stock of the county forever. But worse than that, Sadie would go behind her back and get even sometime or other if it took twenty years. Many wondered what Marsh thought about the business, but as he never mentioned it, and none dared question him, they never knew. In spite of the good going over Delph gave her, Sadie was, in a short time, able to laugh and pity the girl. It was pitiful for any woman to be so trustful of her man; in two months time Sadie was visiting Delph, for it was Sadie's boast that she never held grudges, and no one could make her mad for longcertainly no
t a young triggery-tempered thing like Delph Gregory.

  The matter was forgotten more quickly than such matters generally were. The southern end of Westover County had plenty else of which to talk. The building and opening of a mighty flood proof steel and concrete bridge across the Cumberland, approached on the

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  Burdine side by a mile long sixty foot embankment and on the other by a tunnel through the river bluff, consumed no end of talk. The papers were filled with wars and rumors of wars, but mostly in countries that seemed far away as Mars. There was blacker trouble in the Harlan mines; tales were constantly coming from the rough unsettled Rockcastle country of hill men fled there from their deeds in the mining counties to the east. There was more talk of Roan Sandusky; every year more farmers came to consult with him on this and that. Not that he knew any more than he had ever known, but he had at Doric's insistence and Emma's suggestion started a publicity campaign the year the prices went to the bottom. Roan and Emma and Poke Easy looked up all their friends and college acquaintances doing newspaper work in Kentucky, and since some of Roan's work was well worth writing about, articles with pictures of chickens, fruit trees, newly forested hill sides, members of 4-H clubs began to appear from time to time in various papers.

  And since the pictures and the printed words impressed many people, especially the back hill men, a great deal more than their reality in the county had ever done, they for the first time in their lives saw lanky, tobacco-chewing Roan Sandusky as an important man, one with brains. His importance was multiplied when state and federal funds made it possible for him to have two assistants; one, a tall young man from Georgia, an expert in animal husbandry, an expert rifleman, and a man who feared neither the devil nor irate hill farmers when he insisted on inoculating their hogs for cholera or shooting their cows for TBand so got along amazingly well. The other, however, was the one who gave Roan's office dignity, importance, and prestige. She was a tall girl with beautiful blond hair, beautiful eyes and a beautiful smile. There were women over the county who sniffed and said she put every cent she made on her back, and it was gossiped that even though Roan had found her in a big place like Louisville, she'd been raised in the backwoods of Wolf County where there were neither trains, busses, nor telephones, but the women's talk never troubled the men. Young Cow-Lick Meece from the other side of Kettle Pot Ridge, during the first month of her stay took twelve bulletins, one for each of the three separate trips he made on four consecutive Saturdays. Others of the young back hill men were little better and marveled continually how it was that a

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  woman who looked as if she belonged in Hollywood had come to work in Roan Sandusky's dingy office.

  And Roan sat sometimes with his heels on his desk and his head on his hands as old Reuben Kidd sat, and dreamed of the day when there would be no cholera or TB in hogs and cattle, or rickets in children, or pellagra in the old, or neglect of the trees; and when the people would grow grapes and drink wine instead of so much whiskeyand it such bad stuff at that. He talked sometimes of such things to Poke Easy and Marsh, and Marsh would listen and plan some day to be a member of the county board of education. More and more as Burr-Head grew he thought of the children he saw when some trading expedition or other business took him to the back hills; thin, bare-footed children with shoulder blades like wings hoeing corn on steep hillside fields that were never meant to grow corn. The children ought to be in school learning what ought to grow in place of corn, learning that life for a poor hill farmer could many times be made better than that of a factory worker in the northespecially when times were hard and work was slack.

  Then work and Delph and the busy life about him would whirl his thoughts away. Elections reaped their annual harvests of bitter quarrels with some few deaths, and the great revival meetings coming shortly after saved the souls and restored to grace the ones left alive. And David Jonathan Fairchild saved many from the jail or penitentiary. Old timers like Reuben Kidd, listening to his nimble tongue, would nod and smile and say he was his grandfather through and through.

  Already there was talk that, though young as he was and a bachelor, he should be the next county judge. Men still like to talk of his first casethree young negro boys, sons of a friend of Sober's down the river, had been caught red handed at midnight twenty yards from a farmer's smokehouse with six fat plymouth rock pullets in their hands. The prosecuting attorney as well as the jury had nodded and dozed while the witnesses testified; the men were guilty plain as day. When Poke Easy finished cross examining the witnesses, and building his plea of not guilty, even the young negroes themselves were certain of their innocence.

  Still, the case of the young negroes was an easy matter. They were young; it was their first offense; chickens were cheap, and one

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  of the negroes was as good a fiddler as there was in the county, and anyway the jail was crowded. Such had been the talk of most men when they learned that Poke Easy had taken the case of High Pockets Armstrong. The middle aged hill man had already killed two other menback in his young days when he was hot-headed and wild. On one occasion he had been freed on the grounds of self defense, and on the other he had been sent up for eleven years, but it happened that then the penitentiary was crowdedWestover had its share and moreand the governor was just leaving office and so pardoned a lot of men the way they generally did, and High Pockets' pardon came while he was home snaking up logs to last his wife for firewood.

  But this time it looked as if he'd be bound to go for life. Sadie Huffacre, as usual, was the first to get wind of the trouble. She came back from Hawthorne Town one day, telling of how High Pockets' oldest girl and her baby had come home from Cincinnati where she had gone two years back when she was sixteen. She had married soon after, and now she was home with her baby. She, Sadie, had seen them get off the bus, and the girl was pale and thin, not pretty and plump as she had been when she went away. Sadie had whispered the rest. She, Sadie, had walked right up to her. She had wanted to see the baby, learn if it were sickly looking, too. There was something red like a bad rash on its face, but Lord God that was nothing to what else she saw. There it lay on Lutie's arm with its brown eyes widethe prettiest eyesbut Lord God they never moved or showed a sign of life when the sun came right on its face.

  She'd looked at Lutie, but Lutie had said never a word, just turned and walked away, but Sadie could tell from the look of her that she knew she had a blind baby. And Sadie wondered if the girl knew what ailed her child. It only went to show that anything was liable to happen when a girl went to strange places and married a strange man she'd hardly known a month.

  What happened next was common knowledge to Westover County. High Pockets had, on seeing his daughter and grandchild, left home and walked into Town sometime about midnight, aiming to catch the early morning train for Cincinnati. Men who saw the gun in his shirt and the shine of his eyes, knew where he was headed, and hinted that doing a thing in Westover was one thingbut

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  doing it in Cincinnati was another. High Pockets thought it over and went back home.

  About two weeks later on a warm rainy day in August while Marsh was looking over his cut tobacco for sign of pole sweat, Poke Easy came as he often did to talk of this or that. Not long after Caesar barked again, and Marsh went to the barn door to see who it might be. He saw soon coming up through the corn a tall thin man dressed in the usual blue shirt and overalls. He walked with the long free stride of a hill man, only more slowly than most as if he were fired or old. He carried a long hickory staff, and sometimes he would stop and stand with both hands on the stick, resting and just looking overhead at the corn, the heavy cars sometimes higher than the brim of his black felt hat. Marsh studied him, but when Caesar stopped his growling and ran to him with wagging tail, he called to Poke Easy, ''What do you reckin High Pockets Armstrong is wantin' with me?"

  At mention of the name, Poke Easy swore, mopped his face, and looked as if be would lik
e to run away. "He wants me," he said, and came and waited with Marsh in the door while High Pockets came up through the corn.

  High Pockets shook hands, gave each a brief "Howdy," then pulled out his jackknife, and began cutting the pattern of the twisted plaits on the bark of the hickory stick he carried. Poke Easy watched him uneasily, and Marsh hinted that he thought he'd better go see if Delph had anything she wanted him to do about the house. High Pockets hunkered on his heels in a stable door, and looked up at him with his sky-blue eyes, made bluer still by a week's growth of black whiskers and black bushy brows. "You needn't be runnin' away," he said. "My business it's no secret." He made a clean narrow notch in the hickory stick, then blew on his knife and whetted it slowly up and down one long lean thigh, looking fixedly at Poke Easy as he did so. ''I reckin you know th' trouble that's overtook some a minebad trouble th' law cain't tetch."