Merle opened a jar of corn, pulling the cover off reluctantly but excited. She had forgotten the man already, and sniffed at the corn’s sweet smell with a big grin on her face. The kernels were gold still and swam in a milky fibre. “Fifteen ears and a half,” she announced. “All for one little jar.—If I’d have put the worms in, too, they’d have filled it better. Big milky things and fat!” She tasted a spoonful and poured the rest in a pan. “He’d better appreciate them now. We’re not going to open another soon.”
“There aren’t any more to open,” I told her. “That’s the last one.”
“We don’t get a new man every day,” Mother put in fast. “And it had to be done some time.” She looked excited at having a guest, and young. It was strange how little she’d changed those years, in spite of the planning and work and the disappointments. I think that it was because she took life slowly, and trusted in something a person could neither feel nor see, but knew.
“Not a new man every day, thank God!” Merle mumbled. “This pot won’t fill him as high as his heel, let alone the rest. Men that high ought to learn to eat something cheaper, something a person could buy by the ton or sack, like cobs or hay. God should have been more stingy with his bones, but it’s too late now.”
12
. . . I LIKE to remember that noon. Kerrin did not come in and we felt, as always, more free and at ease without her. Even Father seemed less impatient and screwed with worry, and ate two of the pickled peaches, forgetting to ask how many were left. I saw him put a whole half of one on his bread, and grin at the sweet-sour taste. It wasn’t that Grant was a man easy to know and given to making much fun, nor was he quick and loud like Merle. But things struck him new and differently and he knew how to make his tales come alive. He talked with Father over all the old arguments and theories that we knew too well to debate or even to hear any longer; and, sometimes agreeing, made Father feel that he had a man to support him now. Grant had a kind of dry humor, too, bitter at times but never with any malice or littleness. Later he came to answer Merle back in her own way, but not knowing us well then only laughed at the things she said.
I sat and watched while they talked, and twice Merle piled the corn on his plate for all of her grudging words. The sun came in warm in long streaks across the floor, and the giant geranium plants made a pattern across its gold. When we touched our glasses, white circles of light would move on the walls and ceiling, and the cut-glass dish with the peaches in it made a rainbow-bar on the cloth. The food was good, better than it had ever been before, and Mother had made a braided roll with raisins. I forgot to add up what the bought part must have cost, and was glad of the sugar and cinnamon crust. Grant took a long breath of the spicy smell and then shook his head. “There’re words for most things,” he said, “but none that I know of for this. It’s the nearest to heaven a man can expect this side of Jordan.”
“It’s the nearest we’re most going to get on the other side either,” Merle said. She broke him a piece hot still and yellow.
Grant took a big bite and finished the cake in three. “It’s good,” he told Mother, “but all the praise that comes out of a person’s mouth oughtn’t to mean as much as the food that goes in. Eating’s more honest than any words!”
“Then Max must have been a shouting man,” Merle said sourly. “He ate like a hog, and never spoke when a grunt would do.”
“Women like words too much,” Father said. He leaned back in his chair with the ghost of a grin. “They like to be told what a man would see for himself. A woman’d get fat on words alone.”
“Around in August you’ll wish that was true,” Merle told him. “There’ll be more words and less eating then.” She jerked her head toward the fields we could see beyond the barn, and even now there was cold dust blowing out of the furrows.
“May ought to bring us a flood,” Father said. “Quit nagging and give it a chance to rain. Three years of drouth never come together, and I’ve got a good man to help me now!”
“Drink him a toast in water,” Merle said. “That’s the greatest thing you could honor with, these days.”
Father picked up a glass and drank the toast, with one of his few and sudden smiles. Then shoved back his chair while we sat there surprised, hardly believing we’d seen him do it. “A good dinner, Willa,” he said, then turned very quick toward Grant. “We’re late. Have to go. We’ve wasted too much already.”
Grant stood up then and straightened himself with a jerk. His shoulders were wide and a little bent like vulture wings, and his long arms stretched out thin. “Not wasted for me,” he answered Father. “I could plough up a mountain now.”
“Mountains are what they are, all right,” Father mumbled. “Rock-boulders and stony mud. . . .”
But he looked almost eager instead of grim.
13
I CAME to wonder how we had gotten along alone in the days before Grant had come. He roomed with us and ate all his meals here, too, going back to his father’s land sometimes on Sundays. Father was proud of him then, and acted as though he himself were glorified by Grant’s strength; seemed to feel some credit due him. Grant’s was a kind of long, loose-armed power, and I wondered sometimes with Merle how he moved all his dangling knots and bones hard and together enough to accomplish the things he did. “He looks like a gaunt old long-limbed tree,” she told me once. Dad was around and turned fast on her. “That ain’t for you to say,” he shouted. “Grant’s a good-enough looking man—better-looking than most!” Merle said maybe he was right and as long as Grant did the work he could look like a post or anything else and it wouldn’t matter to her. He was as good-faced as a man has a chance to be, she said, since they have no way of seeming more handsome, as women do. Father stared at her, but didn’t seem quick to catch what she meant. He thought that because she smiled it must be all right and complimentary enough, and trusted her not to sneer.
“Men are all like each other,” Merle said. “We’ll find him no different than any other. They’re like as ponds. Seem to think that just being born sets them apart as gods!”
She talked like this, not with malice but believing it till one day that first week when he came up at noon and found her washing. He came up walking tired and slow the way Dad did, but his face more alive. He never smiled much, but strong and warm when he did, and his whole face lighted up (“Turns on,” Merle said). He’d been ploughing and looked half-starved and his shirt was doused in sweat. Merle was tired, too, her big booming voice getting less loud until her singing was like a croak, and she only jerked her head at him for notice. Grant sat down solid and heavy on the steps, the way Father does—as though he were sunk there forever. Merle twisted the towels out, then pulled up the shirts and flapped them over the edge so he could see they were his own.
Grant jerked himself up fast, came over and told her to let him do the rest. “I’ve got the time now,” he said. “You let me finish up these old sacks.” Merle stained red as rust and started to blurt out something rude.—“What’s the matter?” she started to say. “—You in a rush for the food?”—but managed to smear it over. Grant pulled out three shirts at once and twisted them all together. Squashed the buttons in half. Then he slung them over the line and stood back grinning, red and embarrassed. They were dryer already than the one he had on his back. Merle sat down on the steps, sagged up against the post, and told him to pull out the overalls. She thought him a little mad, I guess, but hoped that he’d finish before the spell passed over. Grant wrenched out the rest and emptied the tubs, and she stared at him as if he were a strange dinosaur or ghoul. I could see her mind changing before my eyes, a hard core softening up. “You’re better than most,” she told him. “Maybe just being a man isn’t all the excuse you need for living.”
“It’s a good enough one,” Grant said. He looked at her and laughed, and then asked why she didn’t go in and start cooking.
“You’ve worked for nothing,” Merle told him, “if that’s why you wanted to help. Marge
t’s done everything already.” She snapped it at him, but not either angry or believing what she said. And I saw Grant watching her when she went away,—a sort of pleased look on his tired face.
14
I WENT back up to the pasture with him that afternoon. I’d never have gone but that he had left the water-jug there and needed more, drinking nearly a gallon in one morning. “You come up and get it,” he said. “Let Merle finish the dishes. She’s had her rest.” Then went out fast before she could slop the water at him. (Only I doubt that she would have now that the pond had shriveled so,—shrunk two feet even then.) We went up the creek-road and he talked to me as though he had really wanted me to come and not just as someone to bring the water back. He never spoke of himself except when I asked him things. He remembered coming that time for the horse when Merle met him out in the yard. She was red and stumpy, he said, and her hair was fuzzy behind. When she saw the horse she had marched right past him “as though I were air or nothing, and pumped him some water from the tank.—Then glared at me like a little bull. Thought maybe I’d steal it from him!” Grant laughed as at something he’d thought of often and grinned over to himself.—I liked to think of her coming back to his mind that way.
The wild cherries were in bloom. It was hot still, and ink-blotter clouds messed up the sky but brought no rain. The spring green was like green sunlight or green fire—something, anyway, more lovely than just leaves—and there were yellow clouds of sassafras along the pasture. We found a snake in the hollow limb of a sycamore, peered close and saw that his eyes were like milk-blue stones, hard and round and without any pupils. I thought he must be blind, but Grant said that for a wild thing to be blind was death, and that it was only the old skin thickened over his eyes before he shed. I felt ashamed to have seen things like this year after year and never stopped to find out the reason or know more about them. Because there had seemed always time ahead, I guess, and never time then. Grant seldom let anything go past without trying to find the meaning of it. “I’ve got a fool hopeless belief,” he said, “that the more we know the more we’ll be able to understand.”
“Maybe for you,” I told him, “but for me only more confusion.”
“Better to be confused than blind,” he said. We watched the snake gliding back, and his coils made a dry and scratching sound. Grant said that the scales would split off from his eyes first. “New eyes first, and then a new skin all over—there’s a text for you, Marget! Lord, I should have been a preacher like Dad!” He put one hand on the fence post and threw himself over the wires, easy as if he had hurled a stone. He frightened the team and they started off, jerking the plough out of the ruts and lurching against each other. Grant didn’t shout or bellow. He turned quick and grinned at me, then started off in a lumbering run. The horses got hooked up in the lines and didn’t go far, but plunged around when he tried to untangle their feet. He didn’t come back when the mess was over, only waved and shouted out something about long-legged fools, which meant all three of them, I guess, and started off up the row singing louder and worse than Kerrin.
Coming back it occurred to me how Dad would have been if this had happened. Hot and howling and angry, not being able to keep things from making him seem ridiculous, and fearful of anything that might tip over his dignity, poor-balanced and easily overthrown. Grant’s furrows were straighter than Dad’s or Max’s ever were. He ploughed deeper, too, and it made me believe that seed might get underground before winter after all.
15
THAT month was unreal and beautiful. No rain came, but it did not seem to matter much. I did not care any more. I forgot the mortgage and the payment due next month, forgot there was anything to fear, and lived in a sort of fog of nameless happiness, indefinable and seeming to have no source, like the spring smell that comes in March before there is even a shred of leaf or flower. I was happy without excuse or reason. The pear trees seemed more beautiful than in all other years, with a strong musk-sweetness on the wind. But even spring was only a lesser miracle. I think now—almost unbelieving—of those first few weeks, remembering the blind happiness that not even the worry over Kerrin could change. Father was for a while more cheerful too, having someone besides just us to talk to now, and someone who felt as he did; although the rest of us could see from the beginning that they were acres apart in thought, and Grant ahead in a hundred ways. Grant liked our father, liked him so much that he never or seldom would show him up before us, though he could have done it whenever we talked together. And only when they were alone would he cancel out arguments, sometimes in a single line or word, with facts that Father either had overlooked or more often not known about. I’d overhear them sometimes and marvel, not so much at all that Grant knew and his way of seeing things whole, as at his power of toppling Dad’s pyramids of thought so that the crash was plain enough and yet without angering him. And Dad thought of Grant as one a little radical and free-thinking perhaps, but a man with sound reason for everything that he had to say.
Grant was a much kinder man and less hard than his own beliefs—beliefs that had grown out of acrid and salty experiences—but there was a layer of stoniness inside him. Some people are soft like quagmire: you touch, and touch down in farther, fumble and press in an ooze of uncertainty, not finding a shard of flint anywhere. But in Grant there was something solid, not arrogance, but a bed-rock of belief. It wasn’t belief in divine goodness, either, but something that served him better. To trust so much in anything—even in one’s own sight—may be a form of blindness itself; but there is a driving force in blindness. It’s the only way to achieve anything, I guess: to put great blinkers on the mind and see only the road ahead.
That he should have this hard, almost cynical attitude toward things and yet at the same time so much kindness, made me feel a gratitude nearly pain. I remember the thankfulness I’d have whenever Dad got his history mixed and tried to prove points before us at the table, and Grant would let it go by, knowing the answer but not wanting to make him seem ridiculous and lay him open to Kerrin’s spite.
Grant had liked Kerrin then. It was not hard to understand, and perhaps I might have, too, had I been he. Might even have loved those things that I hated in her—her fierce unexpectedness and shifting, even her selfishness. . . . She didn’t come in for supper at all any more; and I’d thought it strange at first, since Grant ate here every night, but began after a while to understand—if Kerrin is ever to be understood. It was a part of her difference from us, and partly a desire not to take or to meet him in the same way that we were doing—as one of us. She realized, too, in a sort of distorted way, his clear seeing of things and that he would not always excuse the restless and clever cruelty in her that attracted him sometimes. . . . I wanted to forget her, wanted to pretend a little longer that tomorrow—some time—she would be different. Or gone. It seemed at times that this feeling of waiting, of life suspended and held in a narrow circle, would go with her. I knew that this wasn’t so, that nothing would really begin that had not its roots in ourselves, but could not help feeling she was the thing that caused this smothering. There was something in her—or lacking—that kept her from seeing outside the warped and enormous “I.” It came to me that she would do anything she chose, because she saw wrongly and did not need any excuse but desire. . . . What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness? But it must be something more, too, a positive thing,—inclusion of love and detachment from self. . . . I had to fight up thought by thought to things known and recognized all my life, and yet until this year never realized.
But until May the first fog of happiness covered up much of this, and stood between me and the real seeing.
16
MAY was a queer month. The beginning of understanding. A cold dry month. Rot-sweet smell of mandrakes on the air, but most things almost too chilled to bloom. No rain, and dust coming up behind the plough. Cold dust is a sort of ominous thing, and Father began to worry over the shrunken pond. These things were sourly appropriate to
the month’s end, and yet it began with a quiet ecstasy and happiness.
I went over to the Rathmans’ on the first of the month for seed. Max had a new car by then, out of his wages from the road, but not paid for as yet. He got to town more often than Father did, and brought us back stuff from Union, but said our land was too rutted to drive his car along and so left what he bought down at his house,—a thing which was like Max to do, and we took it for granted now. I was glad to have reason for going there, though. They seemed so solid and safe, and needed so little. Old Rathman had a good market for his grapes, and made wine with what was left over. He knew where to sell, and trucked his stuff to the doors. Their land was their own entirely and had no debt. Whatever grew on it belonged to them and went to pay back no unseen owner and the garden shoved up to the edge of the door, kohlrabis undermining the steps almost. Everything old and rich like the earth.
Theirs was more sheltered land than ours, flat and set in the footsteps of a hill. Old Rathman had not been off the place for ten years, but Karl had gone off to Bailey and married there, and Max got his job on the road. Only Aaron was left of the three to help him. I think the old man had been glad to show them he managed as well alone. He never rested, and looked like a warped old gnome with his hat on top.
This day he was not so sure of himself, but still not fearful. “Two acres of strawberries shrivel up like leafs do,” he said. “Hard . . . dry. . . . No rain! Is one to water by hand? Nein! Let them shrink up!—the Gottdamn little measles!” He grinned then and picked me some from the crate-toppings. All his berries were big on top, and the wizened ones underneath. “Give her a crate, old lady,” he told Mrs. Rathman, and pointed his hand at the flabby spinach leaves. “We can’t eat all of dem tinks.” I tried to tell him we had an acre of dem tinks wilting over at home, but he wouldn’t listen.
Now in November Page 6
