Old Mrs. Rathman was hungry to talk, herself, and told me about the sweet potatoes that Max had raised special for just himself last fall but didn’t recognize when she got them cooked. She told me about this Lena Hone who was Max’s girl . . . “nice as cream in her way of talking . . . black eyes and hair . . . not much to look at though . . . reminds me of you in a way. . . .” She hoped Max would marry soon and stay to home. That Mary of Karl’s hadn’t no children yet. Maybe Max would have better luck with Lena. Would I stay longer? No? Well, a jar of apple-butter then . . .
She must have been beautiful once; her hair white now but her polished eyes unchanged and a kind of grave humor wrinkling her cheeks. I wondered what it was like to live safe. Out of debt. I could not believe that they had their own rawness, too, something gone bad under all this white-looking comfort. And there was nothing then.
Old Rathman stopped me before I left and asked about Grant. “Vot does Pop tink about his new fellow? Better than Max was, maybe?”
I told him that Grant was pretty good, and then he wanted to know if I knew about Ramsey’s loan. Did I know that “this colored man Ramsey” (Rathman always spoke of him in this way, not with hate or suspicion, but as of a creature from some other earth, as one might speak of a Bushman or giraffe)—did I know that this fellow was almost drove off his place last year? I said no, and he told me that Ramsey had come to him and asked for money to pay his rent. “‘But I ain’t got any money,’ I told him. ‘I got land and vegetables, but no money!’—Maybe I should have give him kohlrappys to pay his rent! The old lady give him a jar of pickles but no money.”
Then I made out from his rambling words that Ramsey had gone to Koven’s and gotten the money there. Rathman knew because he had asked old Koven himself. At first Grant had told Ramsey not to pay—too big a rent anyway. “Let’m try to shove you off and see what’ll happen,” he’d said. Christian was scared, though, and not willing to risk it. “Maybe you could get by all right,” he told Grant,—“you ain’t a nigger. You don’t have a wife and seven children. A nigger can’t wait and see what’ll happen. He knows!”
Grant had loaned him the money then, and would have given it sooner but he hated to pay off Turner who didn’t need it and who’d dangled the debt over Christian’s head until he was raw as a Negro could get. To pay off Turner had seemed to Grant like throwing his money down in a sink or propping a wormed old shed with good new poles, but better at least than having the roof crash down on Ramsey’s head. You couldn’t stand by and do nothing just because you thought it was wrong for a man to be trapped that way.
“Gran’ won’t be loaning no more, I guess,” Rathman said. “Koven’s two years behind in his taxes now.”
Here were all of us then, I thought, crawling along the ruts and shoving our debts ahead like the ball of dung-beetles. Worse off than the beetles themselves who can bury their load and be done.—All of us but the Rathmans, anyway. They’re safe, I thought, padded in from fear. They have only to work for the now, and not pay for the years behind. . . .
I came back through their orchard where the early apple trees were in bloom, thick as a snowstorm with white flowers, and the branches long-curved and reaching to the ground. Dear God, but they were beautiful! I stood a few minutes under one that was like the inside of a great white bowl. Chickadees pecked at the scaly bark for aphis and kept up a crying clack. I felt light and foolishly happy,—the Ramseys, the mortgage and Kerrin forgotten and only shadows. And I knew it was partly the hot flower-smell, but more because we had talked of Grant and I’d heard his name.
17
BY THE middle of May nearly all of last year’s cans were gone. Nine jars spoiled. Mother spoke as if this were her own fault for some reason, not blaming the cheap jar-rings that Father bought. He had to, I guess, since there were new dairy sterilizers to buy, and tried to cut down on the things that we used for ourselves. The jars had a rancid and stomach-filling smell that stayed on the hands for hours after we threw the stuff away. The cows gave less milk, and six gallons were lost because of the onions. Milk was scarcer everywhere, but we didn’t get much more at the dairy than before. Last year there had been too much, and all farmers had it; Father got less for the gallon on account of Rathman’s sending his cans in, too. This year nobody had very much, but the price didn’t seem to change—not at the back door of the dairy anyway. There was a wry perfection about the way things worked.
I wished to God it would rain. I could walk in the stream beds by the quarry, and only the ghostly plantain grew stubbornly in the fields. The ground was cracked wide open and Dad was beginning to get more desperate, seeing the pastures start to yellow already. . . . These things are not hard to tell of now. We were used to them and we still had hope. But the things we felt most are hardest to put in words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?
Grant was kind, very kind to me. I could not have asked for anything worse. Something snatched and blundered inside me when I heard his voice unexpectedly, but after a while the foolish ecstasy and fog dried up, and there was only the pain and the reality left. I came to see more clearly after one night when Grant and I had gone up to the north pasture together, hunting his watch that he’d lost near the plough. The stars were windy and brilliant, and one enormous planet burned down along the west. It was dark with no moon, but the white patches of everlasting gleamed out disk-like in the grass. “You hunt near the plough,” he said, “and I’ll thrash in the weeds where it might have jumped.” Then I found it half-buried down near the plough nose and deep in a dusty furrow. The watch was an old big silver thing, and one that he’d owned for years. Grant never could tell the time by sun nor tell it by being hungry. “I’d be coming back in for supper while Merle was wiping up breakfast still,” he said. “Don’t trust anything natural, Marget.—Only the little wheels.” He looked at its round dull gleam in the starlight, and wiped off the dust from its face.
There was a fierce sweet smell from the crab-trees, and I peered up at the stars through their twisted branches. Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It’s like sleep almost. A freedom from self, from ugliness,—escape even from thought of Kerrin and debt and tomorrow. Dark’s like the presence of a father confessor.—Now lay down all the scrabble of your lives . . . confess all the phantoms . . . unburden yourself in dark of the day’s accretions. . . . But when I said to Grant that night was the one sure healing which nothing could steal from a person, he shook his head. “No healing for me, Marget. Night is a sort of blindness. A thing to be gotten over with. I like noon. Short shadows. Like to see what I’m doing.” “—Sun’ll not always show you that,” I wanted to say. But didn’t. Grant had no flat drab face to hide. Nothing that wouldn’t bear noon sun on it. What was it to him that Kerrin got more irrational all the time? What was our mortgage to him? . . . This sense of impermanence and waiting? . . . Love’s unintentional hate?—He could go when he wanted to. He didn’t feel any need for safety and solid earth. Nor did the awful waste in life bother him. There was this layer of hardness in him that accepted things without breaking. . . . I was quiet, thinking these things, and we came back soon. There was no reason to have stayed, but it seemed almost a sin to sleep those nights, blind and dead to the stars. We were so tired, though, that they didn’t matter. Father and Grant used to sleep like clods of iron, and Merle wouldn’t have waked if God Himself had waited outside in the night. But Kerrin went out after dark more than she ever used to.
She was gone still when we came back in, but Father thought it was she in the door with Grant, and turned toward us, trying to see in the smoky light. “Where’ve you been, you two?” he shouted. The lamp shook in his hand, casting out shadows like black fire, and made his glasses gleam out. Grant understood Father pretty well and knew how to calm him down, or at least not make things worse. He told him we’d been out hunting his watch. “Marget found it down in a rut,”
he said. “I think she can see in the dark.” Then Father saw it was I and not Kerrin, and made a sort of relieved, embarrassed grunt. “That you, Marget?” he asked. “You’d better come up to bed soon.” He went upstairs then and left us standing together in the dark. It was I and not Kerrin, and so there was nothing to fear or shout over.
I saw quite plainly what he had meant; nor did it hurt less to know that this was true.
18
. . . I BEGAN to see clearly what I had already known, and yet had not gone far enough in thought to face. I think I first knew it plainly not through any word spoken, but from watching Grant’s face at times when it wasn’t guarded. Grant wasn’t a simple man like Father. Not one with his love and hate near his eyes or mouth. I liked it in him and yet was confused, not being used to people who, like myself, kept their feeling so much hidden.
What Merle felt then, I do not know. We never talked direct or openly of him except in an ordinary way. She spoke sometimes in a brief, almost pitying scorn of the way Kerrin was, and laughed at her sometimes without malice and as only a person neither hating nor loving could. . . . We’d see them standing together over the snake-fern Grant had dug up for Mother, which Kerrin would go out and water every day at the time when he came up with the milk; and Merle would look at me and smile. We’d hear her shrill black laugh, and see Grant smiling down at her hot excited face. I was glad when the fern died and we didn’t have to see Kerrin going through with her farce of caring about it every night. It’s hard to watch people acting fools. (Harder still to watch her dumping out quarts of water on the fern.) Grant tried in sort of pathetic ways to please, and had dug it up out of the ravine woods. When it died we didn’t tell him, but Merle did. She pointed out the dry shriveled thing and said something of “early hay.” Grant laughed but turned red as brass. He went out to dig up another, but couldn’t find any more. “Why does he have to be always pulling things up and moving stuff?” Merle asked me. “Why can’t he leave them alone to grow where they started? Enough things dying without his help!”
In other ways, too, Kerrin was the same.—She had used to take water out twice in the mornings when they cut the hay. I offered once, because she looked tired and I thought she might want me to take it for a change, but she turned on me like a mountain-cat and almost shouted. “You never used to,” she said.—“What do you want to now for?” Looked at me hard and burst out laughing. . . . There was no use to hate. I told myself this: We have no time to hate; it’s a blind, terrible waste—but I could not help it. . . . Kerrin wanted Grant, wanted him more than anything else she had ever snatched at. Because he was tangible, I suppose. It wasn’t the real Grant that she wanted or cared about, because she had never known him underneath. She made me think of the carrion vines that move with a hungry aimlessness, groping blindly in all directions till they find a stalk to wrap on.
I let her go then—she wasn’t much good for other work anyway—and went on down to the strawberry patch. The sun was hot like a blanket of fire across the shoulders, but the wind cold. The ground cracked open and overgrown with crowfoot. The patch was an old one and had few berries. They were hard to keep up each year and replant all the time. I was tired, but the grass smelled good—a hay smell, yet full of green. I remembered years ago sitting down on a ledge of stone under a buckeye tree, and its yellow flowers sifting down like a rain on the ant hills underneath. I don’t know why this should have come back now, except that I remembered how good it had felt to do nothing then and sit there resting my puffed-up feet, not caring or worrying over anything else. I’d been tired, but it wasn’t the same as the feeling this spring: not the tiredness of long waiting and doing things month after month with no change. Nor was there the weight of all these things—I wished I were ten years younger, or ten older! If I were younger, they would not exist; and older—I could learn to accept them. I wished there were someone I could tell all this to. If it had been told, it would not have weighed me down so much. But I could not tell anyone here and go on living with them, knowing they knew and were thinking about it, staring at me with this in their minds. They would have been kind, I know, but kindness is sour comfort.
PART TWOTHE LONG DROUTH
1
BY JUNE things were shriveling brown, but not everything dried and ugly yet. It was not so much the heat and dryness then as the fear of what they would do. I could imagine a kind of awful fascination in the very continuousness of this drouth, a wry perfection in its slow murder of all things. We might have marveled and exclaimed and said there was never anything like it, never anything worse, and shaken our heads, recalling all other years in comparison with a kind of gloomy joy. But this was only for those to whom it was like a play, something that could be forgotten as soon as it was over. For us there was no final and blessed curtain—unless it was death. This was too real.
But sometimes, even in this year, the beauty of certain hours and places was so intolerable that it contracted the heart and left me without words. There was an unearthly smell in evenings, a strange mingling of wild grape and catalpa sweetness with honeysuckle come to flower and unknown blossoming things, and I woke up at night to blinding moonlight and the complaining of a catbird in the firebushes. The black marsh-fields swarmed with fireflies that seemed to stand still in the air for seconds at a time. The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.
For Merle there was a sort of glory in all things, a haloed way of seeing them—I do not know how to tell it—not only in the peacock-blue and brown skins of the lizards, or in the obvious and almost blinding whiteness of the daisy fields, but in everything she saw or did.—In the stoning of cherries and the acid stain in her skin, and the heat and confusion of their preserving . . . the stove raging and too hot to come near, and the steam from the boiling glasses . . . the cherries dissolving in a rich syrup-redness. . . . She stormed around among the kettles, tasting and slopping,—shouted Whoa! and Haw! to the cherries pouring over, dripped wax with one hand and stirred with the other, and sniffed at the strong smell of burned juice blackening where the stuff boiled over. I don’t know what it was—only health perhaps, too much to be contained inside and radiating out like her over-stoked ovens. And then again she’d be quiet, shaken down to dumbness at the sight of wheat fields, red orange and clean like blown fur over hundreds of acres.
The cherries were thick this year in spite of drouth, and Grant brought the fruit up when she didn’t have time; even stoned cherries for her in the evenings, and stayed up late when she canned at night. He did it because he liked pies, he said, and was fearful that Merle would fall asleep and put away God knows what in the jars. The smell of boiling cherries was sweet enough, with a good and acid tang, but I kept thinking of how the sugar was getting down, and wished that Merle would put less in and see if they’d keep that way. I wondered what good all the fruit was going to do us if we couldn’t pay for even the jar-rings soon. There were too many for us to use, but not enough to market since we hadn’t enough to ship and the Union markets were overflooded. It hurt to see anything wasted, and sometimes we trucked them along with the milk.
“Give them away,” Mother said. “Better than swelling the jays and worms. Somebody’ll take them if it don’t cost.”
“We won’t waste spray on the things next year,” Father mumbled. “A man can’t afford to give when nobody gives him back. You can’t work without profit when nobody round you does. I’d give for no cost if I could get back for nothing.”
“Somebody’s got to begin,” Grant said.—The only time that I’ve ever heard him try to stir Dad into useless anger.
“Not just somebody!” Father shouted. “Not just me or you or us!—Everyone’s got to do it. It ain’t possible to give away milk and hogs and time when you have to pay plough and oil—and a man to help!”
“It’s about what you’re doing, anyway,” Grant said.
Father pounded his fist on the table.
“Maybe that’s so,” he snapped, “—maybe so, but I ain’t going to call it right!”
I listened and thought I had heard this a thousand times. It was as new and old and stale and important as the weather.
Then Father had turned to me, glad for excuse of changing the talk, and told me to go up to Ramsey’s that night and ask if he’d loan his mule tomorrow, and that if he would we’d give him help cutting corn in September. Grant looked at Father as though he wondered where we would find the time, and so did I. I wondered, too, if Christian would loan his mule for nothing.
“Maybe you won’t have time in September,” Kerrin said. “We’ve got our own corn to cut.”
“Dad’ll make time,” Mother spoke up fast. “He’s done it before.—Ramsey planted more corn than we did. He’s going to need the help.”
“I can’t work a galled horse,” Father said to Kerrin. “I got to have one of Ramsey’s mules. Who’s going to pay to rent ’m?” He looked at her hard and waited.
She backed down then and told him to go ahead. “Go on,” she said. “—You’ll be sorry.”
Dad grinned in a sort of helpless, exasperated way and turned at me again. “You go,” he said. “Merle’d take too long—she talks too much. You won’t waste time like she does.”
“Lucia’ll talk just as much to Marget;—she’d talk to a fence post even,” I heard Kerrin say, not loud, but intending me to hear,—and I went out fast so it would seem that I couldn’t have heard her.
Now in November Page 7
