But there was one dream I remember which was different from most and stayed alive in my mind for days. I was standing alone at the foot of the pasture hills, and could see Grant coming toward me across the barren creek-bed, and the grass was scorched all around us to its edge. I could see him walking plainly and knew it was Grant, but his face was blurred and though I kept straining my eyes and stared up when he reached me, I never could see his face. “Is that you, Marget?” he asked. “Has Merle gone?” He spoke as if blind and not seeing me either. “She’s here,” I said. “She’s always here. She always will be, I guess.” “I don’t see her,” Grant said. “There’s only rock here, and sheep marks in the dust.” I looked around and could see her nowhere myself, but I told him she was here where the rock was, or gone for only a little while. Then Grant started to go and said there was no use in his waiting. “You stay,” he said. “Take it all. Accept and take everything. Take it hard to you.” I put out my hand to stop him. “Take what?” I asked. Then he turned and came back and I could see that his hands were open and that he was looking straight at me. And for a moment I saw his face plainly as though noon sun were on it. And then I woke up; and the house was as quiet as a tomb, dark-still, and only a dog barking miles away.
It had been so real that all the day after I’d wanted to stop Grant and ask him what the thing was he had never finished, and for a while part of the dream’s own strangeness seemed clung around him. I felt some way that now I knew him better than anyone else ever had, and it was a pleasant thing to pretend for a while.
6
THE drouth went on. Trees withered, the grass turned hay, even the weeds dried into ashes, even the great trees with their roots fifty years under ground. Burdock and cockle were green near the empty creek-bed, but the giant elms began to die. The limas died, lice on their blossoms, convolvulus strangling the string-bean bushes, and the carrots so bound in earth that nothing could budge them from the ground.
I walked some nights in the hay fields hoping to find a cooler air, and the desire for rain came to be almost a physical hurt. I could not feel any more the immensity of night and space, that littleness we speak of feeling before the stretching of fields and stars. I felt always too big and clumsy and achingly present. I could not shrink.
And then one noon when it seemed that we could not stand it any longer, that we should dry and crack open like the earth, there was a sudden blast of cold air and in the north we saw an enormous bank of rising clouds. The air had been hot and still, storm-quiet and dark; but for a week clouds ominous and storm-surfed had been covering the sky and dissolving into nothing. The sunsets were clear and crystal as after a great rain, but not one drop had fallen. Now we saw the clouds tower up and reach forward like great waves, and there was the bull-mumbling of thunder. It had come up fast and still, no warning except the quiet, and we stood there staring like blocks of stone. Then Merle shouted, “It’s here!” and ran out fast like a crazy person, and we saw stabs of lightning all through the black upboiling mass. Dad looked at Mother, and I saw the awful unmasking of his face, as if all the underground terror and despair were brought to the surface by his hope, and I felt a jab of pity and love for him stronger than I’d ever known before. Mother snatched up a bucket and put it out on the stones, half-wild to think that a drop might escape or go where it wasn’t needed. We dragged out buckets and saucepans, even grabbed up bowls and put them out on the window-sill, and Merle pulled Grant’s drinking-cup down from the nail. It got darker and a fierce wind whipped our clothes, and Merle was wild with excitement and the cold rushing of air. We saw Kerrin running up from the barn, lashed back and forth like a willow switch, and the sheep poured down along the road in a lumpy flood, baaing and crying toward the barn. I wanted to run and shriek, get wings and flap like the swooping crows. Grant looked ten years younger, shouted and called like a boy. We all looked at each other and felt burst free, poured out like rain. “Bring up the tubs,” Father shouted. “She’s coming, all right! She’s here, I tell you!” He ran toward the cellar steps just as the first drops fell, hard-splashing and wide apart. He staggered back up with the wash-tubs, and the drops struck down like a noise of hammers on hollow tin. There was a wonderful brightness on Mother’s face, a sort of light shining from it, almost a rapt and mystic look as she stood there with flower-pots dangling from her hand.
Those first drops scattered a few dead leaves on the vine and sank out of sight in earth. In the north a rift of blue widened and spread with terrible swiftness. The storm clouds loomed high and went on south. No more drops fell, and a long pole of sunlight came down through the clouds. A burnt and ragged hole in the clouds with the sun’s eye coming through. We could feel the wind dying already, leaving only a cooler air. No rain.
Father’s knees seemed to crumple up under him and he sat down heavy on the steps.
“God’s will be done!” Kerrin said, and burst out laughing. “What’re the barrels for, Grant?”
“Tubs to catch sunlight in,” he answered her, “—storing up sweet light for the dark!” He looked fierce and haggard, sweat dry on his face from the wind, and a wire-cut ragged across his cheek like a lightning mark. Kerrin started to laugh again and threw up her arms. She looked queer and ridiculous, and I saw how thin she’d gotten, her neck like a twist of wire, and the wind seemed to blow through her bones. It made my heart sick to look at her. Grant turned away and shaded his eyes toward the sun. “Damned old Cyclopean eye!” he muttered. Stared up hating and helpless at the sky.
The clouds moved out and apart. Enormous stretches of sky were clean as glass. The thunder sounded a long way off, almost unheard. . . . Nothing was changed at all.
7
CHRISTIAN RAMSEY came up that night. Father was lying out on the porch half-asleep, and had not spoken a word since the storm passed over. Kerrin said almost nothing either, only watched Grant. The coolness was gone and the wind smothered already. I think it is strange how much the mind can endure and still hold on to its shell of sanity. Does too-great fear annul itself? Too much sickness cancel pain? . . . An awful patience seemed to come over us, a numbness that was in itself a kind of death.
Christian looked like a ragged skeleton in the moonlight, his eyes and cheek-bones dim white marks. Merle woke up Father who stared at Ramsey, not knowing the man at first. I pushed a chair toward him, but Ramsey kept on standing there, one hand picking at the porch rail. Father sat up and peered at him through the dark. “What didja come for, Ramsey?” he asked, his voice suspicious and hard, but with an exhausted falling at the end.
“We got to git off the farm,” Ramsey said. He swallowed his voice in a nervous mumble and it made Father angry because he had to strain hard to hear all the words. “I come up tonight because the crop’s gone for sure. Lucia says it is done for sure. We thought it would rain certain this time. We waited all day and nothing come.” He pulled something small and crumpled out of his pocket and held it up. “This a potato-stalk. Look like an ol’ dry weed!”
“So’s everyone’s,” Father said. “Corn’s gone. Everything’s blasted. I can’t help you.”
“It’s the rent,” Christian said. “We ain’t a farm if we can’t pay up. It’s a year behind now. I thought maybe you-all—”
“You thought wrong, I reckon, Ramsey.” Father turned himself over with his back to Christian. “I’d help you some if I had it, but I ain’t. I can pay my own, but I ain’t a cent to spare.”
“—A loan, I mean,” Ramsey said. “We’d pay it back next year maybe.” He couldn’t seem to believe that Father had understood and was still refusing him.
“If I had it I’d loan it, Ramsey,” Dad said, short and tired. “I haven’t got it. That’s all.”
“But what’ll I do?” Christian burst out desperate. “We ain’t no place to go! Lucia don’ want to live no place else. We want to stay here and live!”
“Got any relatives?” Father asked. “Won’t anyone else loan you money round here?”
Ra
msey stared at the ground and shook his head. “I been every place before. I been up to the county, but they tol’ me so long as I don’ need food that I got to manage.”
Dad sat up and wiped his face. “I’m sorry, Ramsey,” he said. “There ain’t anything I can do.” He got up and lurched inside the door, bent over like a mound.
Ramsey stared after him. I was glad it was dark and we could not see his face and the horrible stricken look that must be there. Then he turned and started to shuffle off, talking confusedly to himself in a black bewildered mutter.
There was nothing that any of us could do or say. Nothing at all. Dad was right. We had no money to spare. Food,—but food wouldn’t pay off rent. We had not bought anything for two months then, not even sugar except for canning. . . . I could hear Merle crying when he’d gone, and even Kerrin looked sick.
8
GRANT went up to Turner’s next morning, but might as well have saved his time. “Ramseys don’t make good tenants,” Turner said. “Don’t know how to get most off the farm. Anyone else’d have managed.” Grant told him nobody’d managed this year, but he only smiled. “He wasn’t cruel,” Grant said. “Not cruel like a boy gouging toad eyes out. It’s only that he hasn’t a mind,—his imagination a hollow. He ‘saw,’ he ‘quite understood,’—but he didn’t really see anything at all. I said, ‘You don’t understand what it means to Ramsey!’—God! I didn’t know how to put it in words and make the old man see! ‘Ramsey’s worked all his life on the land,’ I said. ‘Nine children now . . . no relatives . . . no place to go. . . .’ But Turner just sat there like an egg, a stone! ‘Niggers make poor tenants,’ he’d keep saying. ‘A white man would have managed.’ Then I got mad and asked if he thought being niggers kept rain off their land, but he only grinned. Said he needed the rent and was ‘making plans.’ Ramsey is not included in these ‘plans.’”
“They’ll have to get out then?” Mother asked. “There’s nothing more to be done?”
“Only the moving,” Grant answered. More bitter than I’d ever seen him before.
“You should have hit him a good one, Grant!” Merle said. “Given him one for me. Hit him so hard he’d never have bounced back up again.”
“He wouldn’t have bounced,” Grant muttered sourly. “He’d have crumpled up into dust. Dry rot.”
To us the horror of this poverty lay in the fear and the scraping that left mind and soul raw and quick to infection; but to Mother it was the shame of being unable to help, of standing by bound and helpless and seeing life make its assault on others. . . . And there was nothing to do this time but watch.
9
THE last evening of July we sat out on the porch, quiet, Father thumbing over the almanac in search of August rains. Grant came up while we were there, dumped down his pails and went over to look at the barometer the way Merle does every evening, as if there was still some power in the broken old thing to bring down rain instead of marking always the “Clear and Dry.”—She used to shake it sometimes, but the weather-hand never moved. Grant saw me watching, and grinned, knowing I’d seen him peer at it only an hour ago when he came up for the buckets. “It might of changed—you can’t always tell,” he said. He was burned out, heat-hollowed but still big, his craggy cheek-bones broadened out and jutting where flesh was drained away. “You get to work,” he said. “Don’t spy on a person’s failings! There’s a kind of haze, anyway, I noticed—” I knew it was only dust and so did he, but my mind was too shrunk to think of an answer, and he’d given up waiting for me to talk back the way Merle did, and pretended he wanted none.
He sat down by me and we stared off into the valley-greyness. A sort of dull purple began to wash up its walls, and the one creek pool was a tarnished brass. But along the bluffs there was still a late red light on the stones. We sat there together but earths apart, his thoughts as always on Merle, and I knew I had only to wait and he’d say something of her soon. And I sat there wondering if ever while still alive I’d be rid of this old and familiar pain, ancient as life—love without return or hope, but unaltered by any change. . . . He sat stooped over as though he had found how much harder resistance makes those things which are inevitable anyway, and there was about him the almost shameful tiredness that comes of heat and not labor. Then I saw I was wrong when he turned to get up, and that all of the still defiance and tautness was there inside. Rod-stiff and quiet. Refusing stubbornly to accept life on its own terms and make for himself a dreary peace. He’d take what came for a while—but not always.
A small breeze came up and moved the dead leaves on a vine—it was almost cool in the dry stillness—and then died. “It’ll come back,” Dad said. “It’s more than the valley farmers have. Down in the bottom-land they’ve got no wind at all.” He took off his hat and laid it on the steps, mopped at his wet hair growing thin and the red scalp shining damp through. He seemed more cheerful in a way, like a man who had touched bottom, going down through so much that no more seemed possible, and had begun to hope.
There was no sound. Only once the dry bawling of a thirsty steer a long way off toward Rathman’s. The breeze came up again, moving Grant’s wet hair. “Nights ain’t so hot as they were,” Dad spoke again. “Almost cold down by the stream.”
“Next year’ll be different,” Mother said. “I’ve never known drouth for three years straight together. Corn ought to bring more with the shortage.”
“It might,” Dad said. He had come after these ten years to say nothing positively or to predict. We always said “ought” or “might,” and seldom “will.” There was a hope though, even if feeble and a long way off, and it made the heat and the death that was all around us seem less, and a slow, reluctant cooling came in the air. The fog of purple crawled up high on the bluffs, blotted the stream-bed and the firs. Next year . . . another lease of hope . . . a chance even to lay something by with a margin over. This drouth had happened. It was here and it could not happen again. Earth would compensate somehow for this dry hell and withering. . . .
Suddenly Grant got up and walked out a way in the yard. He stared off south down the road, and we saw two mules with a wagon, blurred by their own dust and crawling painfully slow.
“Ramsey’s mules,” Grant said.
Dad peered through his dusty glasses and asked where Ramsey’d be going at this hour. “Must be wrong, Grant,” he said. “Ramsey’s no time to ride around—no business to on a week-day.”
“Ramsey’s got all the time he wants now,” Grant said. “More than he’ll ever use.” But Dad didn’t understand.
The wagon came nearer and we saw that Christian was driving, bent over and holding the reins as if half-asleep. Lucia sat up beside him, enormous and overflowing the seat, Mac in her arms asleep and dirty. The other children were back in the wagon, crammed between boxes and things that might have been kindling or chairs. They stared at us gravely, Henry’s face puffed and drawn out with crying. One of the little girls waved. They stopped at the gate, sweat running down off the mules’ hide, and the hair wet-black on their faces under the socket hollows. One had a harness-sore big as a hand across his rump, black on the edge but red where the flies were.
“Turner kicked him out,” Grant said. “He couldn’t scratch up the rent.”
Dad looked at him and said, “I see,” as one who neither believed nor understood, but wanted us to think that he did. It came as a sort of shock, though Ramsey meant nothing to him.
Grant went out with me to the gate. The children were queer and solemn, and even Lucia looked old. “Gawd-damned ol’ alligatah nosed us out, Mistah Koven. Sent his man ovah and said not to make no trouble. Nevah come hisse’f or I’d a smash a stove off top his head. He knowed it, too!” Henry climbed down over the wheel and put his hand in Grant’s. He looked up solemnly and picked his nose. Grant asked if they had any place to go, but Ramsey shook his head. “Stay in Union somewhere. Lucia might git wuk in the fact’ry there.” He stared down at the mules and did not turn his head to look at us; sullen a
nd hopeless, making anything that we said seem hollow. “We got ol’ Mooh still,” Henry whispered, and pointed to Moore’s ghost-body tied to the wheel by a dirty string. “He wanta kill’m, but Mom say no, you keep’m foh chillen!”
Ramsey lifted the reins and straightened up, flicked at the mules and spoke to Henry.—Not angrily, but as though nothing mattered much and he had only remembered to call him from long habit. Grant picked Henry up and wedged him next to the rusty bed. The wagon was filled with stuff that looked like a junk-man’s leavings. Paula sat on a pile of rusty cans and held in her arms an old tire-tube, blasted and full of holes. “Shoe-patchin’s,” Henry told us. Under the sacks and furniture the back was piled with corn.
“We took’m,” Lucia said. “Chrishun owe everything to Mistah Turner, so we stole all we could fit in a wagon and took’m along. He gonna come fetch the mules when we git hauled, but said he don’ want the wagon. That’s all the corn that came to ear.”
“Going to sell it?” Grant asked her. “You won’t have anything left to feed it to.”
Lucia grinned. “Going to keep her, Mistah Koven. Corn keeps a long time. Might git us some chickens an’ a hawg some day. Then we’ll have somethin’ to feed’m with!” She sat up confident and serene-looking. “Tell your folks goodbye, Miss Marget. Goodbye, yohse’f. Goodbye, Mistah Koven!”
Christian jerked at the reins, and they started crawling forward again. Henry waved wildly, standing up in the wagon and leaning over the edge. The children shrieked goodbye and Lucia waved her hand.—Enormous and black and her face twisted up in a sudden flood of crying.
The mules crept around the turn where the blasted cornfield was, and were out of sight.
“That’s what will happen to us,” I was thinking. “We’ll go back crawling the same way we came.”
Now in November Page 10
