The roads were hub-high with sweet clover and wild roses spraying out in the dust. It was a warm day, and when we walked down the road it seemed as if larks flew up from every post, singing and yellow-vested. The fields were daisy-flooded and white with yarrow. A day almost too rich, too swamped with honeysuckle. When we came the church was already crowded, its yard full and trampled with wagons and old buggies. We went inside without stopping to talk to anyone, but Kerrin said that the church smelt musty, and hung around outside the door, hoping some fellow would speak to her, I guess. But they were all stuck together, like a gangling bunch of herons, out where the horses were. The women stared at her standing there alone, and after a while she came inside and sat down behind as though she belonged to some other family and not to us.
Merle looked at the organ with its shabby and familiar face, and whispered that it seemed different, more church-bound and primly humble than the times when Kerrin played it. She had used to sneak up in late afternoons or early mornings, and creep in through the unlocked window. Merle and I’d come with her sometimes and sit on the tombstones or the step while she played us wild hymns or queer uncertain jazz, forcing the poor old pipes to quaver with ungodly and pagan sounds. We wandered around deciphering the stones, and once found a locust clung to the Boggs’ eroded stone, pulling his soft and pursy body over the names, hunting for foothold to free himself and split the thin scum of his shell. There were orange lilies growing wild around the graves, and black-eyed susans, but every Sunday before the minister came they were all slashed down and the graves trimmed back to a decent homeliness. When the organ got tired and its breath too asthmatic, Kerrin would come out and go home, striding on ahead of us like a red-haloed saint in the sun. We did not have to come and go with her at the time she chose, but always did, feeling a sort of undefined respect for anything that was older—in the way of years at least. We had come often to hear her play wild and invented pieces of her own that sounded like witches shrieking at each other, but this was the first time we had come to church and gone in at the front door with other people.
I stared across at the men and wondered if they would notice that I was there, but knew I was plain-sewn looking and the kind that an eye would look at without seeing, and I kept feeling the back of my head for fear that the braid-ends had come loose. I wondered why the people were here and if God was here, and the doubt and questioning began again—that doubt which had run like a tunneled stream, coming to surface at unforeseen and unwanted times before, and has gone through all the years afterward. . . . What had they come for, and did they believe what they heard, and did they live by it afterward at all? It was not the minister, a stupid and earnest little man, so much as the people coming to hear him that tormented and puzzled me. “Sin,” shouted the little man, “is the cause of all the evil in the world. Sin is a wicked thing. Pray to be delivered from sin!” And for an hour he said the same thing over in other words and ways, but gave no explanation of what this evil thing might be. So at last when I came to see he was never going to tell us—either because he did not know or thought it would take too long—I began to look around and think of the people there, and if in what I knew and had heard of their lives there was any plan or pattern that could answer their being here.
I looked at the back of old Vigney Hickam with the green dress tight on her shoulder-blades, and her hair strained taut up to her hat. I wondered if what the minister said could mean anything to her, a spinster and living with old Mrs. Hickam a mile off the main road, and no chance to do any evil even if she had wanted to.—Unless it were cutting down fence-rows and ploughing up phlox, which I doubted the minister would have thought sins worthy of mention, being less colorful than adultery or fornication.
Joe Rathman and his wife were there, the old man lost like an ancient gnome in his great black suit, and not looking as though he were hearing a word of what was said.—Was probably sitting there patient and resigned, because he had sat there patient and resigned once a month all his life, and took this hour to reckon his chicken-savings. The three Rathman sons never came—big chuckmeat-looking boys of whom Father had said even then that Aaron was the best, and it was always of Aaron Mrs. Rathman talked. Their not being here gave me more to wonder and think about than if they had come and sat in an ox-like row. Aaron was different from the rest, with more shape to his face and less thickness between him and his feelings. He saw that things weren’t always just black or white, but that there were shades between.
I looked at Miss Amy Meister whose brother had come back from the war and killed their father in one of his raging times, but she went on about her life just the same, raising bees and selling great yellow combs each fall, and knew more of evil and death than the minister ever had dreamed of in all his eighty years. But she sat there listening like a child while he talked of this formless sin. There was Stella Darden who’d married a tenant farmer and lived with his fourteen relatives in a one-room shack that wasn’t much bigger than two outhouses—and hadn’t any heat in winter, Aaron said, but what came out of themselves to warm the place. There was Leon Kind whose son had left him and gone away, not being able to stand the silence that Leon kept since his wife died. . . . And then I watched Mother sitting there, listening quiet, but more as though she were having some inner communion of her own, feeding and watering some faith of which the organ and church and minister were only the symbol and surroundings. She listened only to hear the sound of faith in his voice, and not to the words that meant little or nothing. I wanted to believe as she did, quietly, very steadfast, without reasoning or beyond reason, with a faith that seemed as much part of her as her hands or face. . . . But I never could. It was as though faith were a thing one was born with, like color or eyes or arms, and wouldn’t be otherwise obtained.
When it came time for communion, Merle and I looked forward to having the little cups and crumbs, and wondered if it would be elderberry or wild-grape wine; and Mother’s face had a rapt and luminous light about it, a sort of mystic anticipation as though she were worlds away. But before the taking began, we saw the deacon creep down the aisle toward Mother, and everyone’s head turn around at once, pulled slyly and slow as by one big string. He leaned over and whispered behind his hand. “You’ll have to get out,” he said. “You don’t belong to the church. Only church-members take communion.” Mother stared at him, not understanding, and fumbled at her purse. “You’ll have to get out,” he said more loudly, and Kerrin punched Mother on the arm. “Let’m keep their old kraut-juice then!” she muttered, and started down the aisle. Mother said, “Oh, I see,” and got up fast, nodding her head in a nervous way she had, trying to make him feel he had given no offence. People stared at us, curious and blank, and Vigney’s mound of white daisies trembled on her head. We all got up and filed out behind each other, and Kerrin tried to bang the door shut, but it only swung back softly. You couldn’t hear anything but the organ panting out “It was there, it was there that I first saw the light, and the burden of my sins rolled away.”
We stood there outside and looked at each other, with the blank white face of the door behind us. I began to snicker, and Mother smiled but looked as if she had lost some irreplaceable thing and had been jerked back suddenly into life, and empty-handed. Then Kerrin, before we could stop her, yanked up a grass clump and smeared a cross-shaped stain on the door. “That for the pack of them!” she said. “Wormed old hickory-shells!” Mother was half out of her mind with horror, and tried to wipe it off with her underskirt but only managed to blotch out the shape and leave a smudge of grey. There wasn’t any water near, and Merle tried spitting on it but didn’t help much, and then the organ stopped wheezing, and we were afraid someone would come out and find us all there, spitting and scrubbing on the door, so we walked off fast toward the road, Mother distracted and hot with sun, and Kerrin striding on tall ahead, pretending she did not know or belong to us.
“What did we do?” Merle kept asking. “Why’re we different than other peopl
e?” But dust came up in hot clouds around us, and the sun was a drying fire, and nobody wanted to answer her. Nor would we have known what the answer was.
More now than ever, sitting there listening to Merle play and remembering that other Sunday, I wanted to know the reasons. And, more than that, wanted something outside myself. But a faith that would fit life, not just hide it. There was a great deal that I would have liked to believe. I would have liked to believe that whatever came to us was just, and be able to say like Wally Hutton’s wife, rolling her eyes up piously, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” as she buried her seventh child like a bone for the feast of the Resurrection. It would be easier to bear the inevitable and just, if there were no way out. But surely, I thought, we have the right to live as fully as anyone else! Are we and all those around us—the Ramseys and Huttons and Meisters and all the rest—any worse than people who have no fear, no slough to fill, are not pawns to drouth and frost? Why were we chosen to be so stinted? . . . Perhaps if we could have been cut off from all seeing and hearing of those rare safe ones who had no need, we could have begun to blame it on God and be at peace. Knowledge is a two-edged knife, all blade, with no handle for even the owner to strike out with.
But it all came back to the same thing in the end, and I knew that no law or plan or freedom from debt could give me the one thing that I wanted more than all of the rest, and no law could make Grant love me.
5
BY JULY half of the corn was dead and flapped in the fields like brittle paper. The pastures burned to a cinder. I stumbled once in the woods and the ash of dry leaves flew up like a dust. Milk shriveled up in the cows. Prices went up, we heard again, but Dad got no more for his milk and got less for the cows he sold, since nearly all other farmers were selling off. The creeks were dry rock-beds then, hot stones that sent up a quiver in the air. The ponds were holes cracked open and glazed with a drying mud. I kept hearing the calves bawl all the time, hot and thirsty in the pastures, but could only water them in the evenings. We had to haul from a pond three miles away, and the horses got sores, even with rest when we borrowed Ramsey’s mules. The heat was like a hand on the face all day and night. When everything was finally dead, I thought that relief from hope would come, but hope’s an obsession that never dies.—Perhaps the ponds will fill up again . . . the fall pastures might come back with rain . . . the cistern get deep again. . . . There was still the awful torture of hope that would die only with life.
Merle alone didn’t seem to mind the heat. She worked out in the fields with Grant and Dad, and was burned deep to a kind of smouldering brown. I noticed she grew more quiet in those days, not from the thing that was wasting Kerrin, draining her like black tallow: but something had started to worry her out of mildness. A sort of fear and responsibility. She tried to avoid Grant, and talked to him with a queer mixture of hesitancy and frankness. I pitied Grant and wondered if he was learning, as I had, the numbness of patience made possible only by blindly shoving away all doubt. He never complained, and sometimes I wished that he would say more. Shout or curse. His silence seemed like a wall against some rising flood.
Because I was quiet and dull I noticed Grant more than the others did, and sometimes even in the middle of talking he would seem years away from us and gone into himself. He was always kind; joked with us and praised the food, and asked sometimes for a special thing—for rice-balls or fritters with gravy. But even living day after day with him as we did and having to share the most trivial things, he seemed remote and grave, and there was a dignity about him that I loved.
It came on me suddenly once, with no reason for knowing, but with a certainty nothing could shake or change, that neither Mother nor Grant looked up to or envied any man. It was not a self-pride or a feeling of being different.—Not that at all. But a sort of faith in the dignity of the human spirit. I only stumble for words to make this plain. It is not a thing to be trapped in little letters and spelled for children. I only know it was there and gave them an inch of height beyond us; and that they were never petty or even ridiculous, though often mistaken enough, I guess.
After a while we had less work, so much of the garden stuff having died, and the ground was too hard for ploughing. We sat out and talked on the nights too hot for sleep and too dark for reading or work. There wasn’t much new to read even if there had been light to see. Merle never complained about this and, re-reading all of the old books, pretended to get more out of the fourth time than the third. Only once I heard her break out in exasperation, throwing away some grease-marked history of early battles. “God’s name!” she said. “Why can’t we get something written after the prophets died!—Something that doesn’t taste of Adam. I want to know what people are saying now!”
“The same things they always did, I guess,” Mother said. “Only maybe they’ve got a new way of saying it now.”
“A new way might help some,” Merle had answered. She’d looked more tired than I’d ever seen her, and did not pick up the book or smile. “It doesn’t fit to be scraped like this, with God or Something squeezing us into boxes marked ‘Extra small’! We can’t grow in the dark like fungus does.—If I thought this would always be, I—” She didn’t finish, but sat there drumming her fingers up and down in a helpless way. After all, she’d known there was little use in shouting.
These nights when we sat and talked in the dark she tried to dredge Grant of everything that he knew, or had heard or read or seen. “What did they look like there?” she’d ask him. “What did they say? What did they read? . . . If the man had won, why didn’t they give him the prize? Because his name didn’t signify! His name!—That’s strange.—That’s hard to understand. . . . Well, what did he say? How did he look? How does a person take injustice like that?—‘Takes it hard and quiet. Takes it like a rock,’ you say! That’s no way to do; that’s no way at all! A man ought to shout, ought not to suffer and be dumb! . . . Well, what did they wear when the time had come?—No color? no robes?—Black! Only black? What person would dress in black when they had the money for red? Good Lord, one might as well have no money at all! Might as well be a dairy farmer! . . . What did they have to eat and how did they serve it? Was it meat they had? or fish, or what?—You don’t remember? You’ve forgotten already what they had? You’re worse than a book half-blotted out. A person ought to remember all that he sees. Ought to be an enormous sponge of things! . . .”
“Leave him alone,” Father would say at last. “Ain’t you ever satisfied, Merle?”
But Merle had her answer always ready. “Not till I’m deaf and dumb and blind,” she would say triumphantly. “Not till I’m ploughed down under corn!”
Grant always liked to answer her questions, though and would sit there quietly, leaning his back against the rickety pillars and trying to relive again in words all the other years of his life. I think if he could he would have remembered the color of sky on such and such a day, and the name of the station clerk in each town that he’d wandered through. He tried to rake up every legend or tale that he’d ever read to please her, and sometimes I’d come on him standing alone, a half-opened gate forgotten under his hand, searching his mind for the names and place of some memory brought back by a sudden sound or smell, or recalled by some unimportant word.
Kerrin would come these evenings and lie half-asleep in the porch’s shadow; some nights not saying a word, and other times very shrilly excited. She would interrupt Grant and tell us things. she’d picked up around on the farms.—Scandals half true and half invented, of how old Leon Kind, who’d been going strange, had watered his dying garden with milk—poured out nine gallons still warm from the buckets over his shriveled beans. She told us of how she had seen a light moving along Miss Vigney’s lane at twelve; and Miss Vigney, who never stayed up after dark for fear of using her oil and candles, had left something burning in her window, and one could see her shadow against the blind. These things were true, she would swear: she had heard from someone who knew, she had seen them herse
lf. She had a way of retelling that made them seem strange and sinister and a little vile. When she heard of a death or accident, she was never at peace until she knew every circumstance of how it had come to be. And somehow out of her words one got a picture of restlessness and fear widening and spreading through all the farms. Out of poverty fear, and fear bringing hate; and out of hate a sly violence, and sometimes insanity or death. She slurred the patience we knew was there, and never spoke of a saner planning that might in time change all our shrunken lives.
I was glad of the evenings, even of those when Kerrin talked in her fast and half-ghoulish way. They kept me from sleep, and in sleep I dreamed too much. The dreams were always alike, never as strange or beautiful as Merle’s, nor as terrible as hers, but monotonous and true. They were nothing more than a living again of the days, with the quiet desires and fears spoken aloud and received as they might have been in life. Never in all the dreams was the moment of happiness complete, or even the point of madness or pain quite reached. They ended always just on the margin of some great evil or ecstasy, and I would wake up hot and cold, and stiff as one dead, and see Father groping along the hall in the early light.
Now in November Page 9
