Now in November

by Josephine W. Johnson

  “Poor old Lucia!” Grant said. “I wish that she’d had her crack at Turner!”

  10

  THAT same week Old Rathman fell and broke his hip. Grant went over next day and stayed awhile to help them.—Max had married his Lena, and brought her home to live on account of the rent being free, but was away all day himself, and the rest of the boys were gone now. Old Rathman had gone up to bed, Grant told us, and one of his dizzy spells came on and he fell. The old lady heard him and went up and tried to haul him on the bed but couldn’t lift him, and then went down where Max had just come in and was starting to eat his supper. “Max,” she’d said, “when you finish supper, come help me lift Pop up on the bed.” They didn’t know till the doctor came that he’d broken his hip in two places.

  “The old man puttered around too long—had head-spinnings before,” Father said. “Won’t never quit work till he can’t lift a hand or foot.”

  —Like you, I wanted to say. Father wasn’t well and he worked too hard. I wished he had some of Mother’s sanity and would take things slower. It’s wrong to waste life for the living’s sake. She felt things as much as he did, wanted comfort, and yet could more easily do without. A curious warm aliveness under and over some inner core that was not attached to it . . . more wholly alive because less dependent on life. . . .

  Grant told Dad he was going to help at Rathman’s a couple of mornings. Three acres of melons the old man had left. Blood-ripe and had to be hauled in a day, otherwise there’d be nothing but fields of pulp.

  “I don’t pay you to help at Rathman’s,” Father said, forgetting he never paid Grant anyway. They sat out muttering on the steps while we worked inside. Grant’s big shadow cast out longer than Father’s down the path from the kitchen light. We could hear what they said, but they talked as if we didn’t exist. Although I doubt that even in these times Grant was entirely unaware of Merle’s walking back and forth in the room behind him, shoving her kettles on and off the stove.

  “I don’t ask you to pay me,” Grant said.

  “And Max won’t neither,” Dad answered. “Max don’t pay anybody but himself.”

  “He can’t quit his job,” Grant said. “Somebody’s got to be the goat. We can’t cut here tomorrow, anyway. There’s nothing ready.”

  “There ain’t nothing ever going to be ready, either,” Dad said. “Ironweed-hay and a silo full of grasshoppers.”

  “We should have grown melons, too,” Kerrin said. She spoke out of the dark where she’d stood there listening, and waited for Grant to say she was right, but he only answered something about hill country and no rain. Dad sat up and turned at her, “Nothing ever right, is it? Nothing ever done right like other people!” He got up and shuffled off to the barn. “You go ahead,” he rumbled back at Grant. “You go do what you want.”

  Kerrin came and sat down where he’d been by Grant. She sat near him in a kind of hungry and yet hesitating way, but he didn’t move or turn toward her, only stared off after Dad.—Poor crazy Kerrin! All that she did I wanted at times to do, but had more sense or less courage—I do not know which it was.

  11

  OLD RATHMAN’S accident had seemed a sudden and awful thing, wrenching away the thickness of their comfort and leaving them now no better off than the rest of us. Even worse off, perhaps.

  I went over one day two weeks later and talked a long time with Mrs. Rathman back up in the orchard out of sight of the house. She looked very old, sagged and pouched and shrunk of all life. “That Lena!” she said. “I haven’t speak to her for two weeks now! I talk to Max but not to her. I picked nine boxes of lima-beans and have them all ready and these people call up and ask for them and Lena says no, she ain’t time to take them in, she’s got her washing to do, and she’s done enough for me and Pop, she says, and I ain’t any way to get in town, with Max gone all day and Pop sick in bed, and the boxes had to set there and shrivel till they weren’t even fit for the crows to eat. Then she comes, asks me for money to pay the ’lectric bill, the telephone bill—the taxes she wants to have me pay—and I asked her where the money was she and Max got off of Pop’s berries that they took and stripped and sold before I got any of a few I was saving for the kind of wine that he likes, and Lena said she didn’t know nothing about it, and Max said he lost on all them berries and got less than the cost of hauling, so he just kept the money and paid on the car with it—that same money he got from the berries.—And sometimes she says, ‘We don’t want to stay here no longer. It’s too Gottdamn hot upstairs anyway,’ and I tell her she should go then, but they won’t because it’s cheap here and I don’t charge them no rent, and she asks me what I would do if she and Max went and Pop sick and all the boys gone, and I said I’d manage easy and could do all right without her, but she didn’t have anything to say because they ain’t anywhere else they can go for nothing, and their car ain’t paid for, I know, because a man called up here one day before I had the telephone took out when they wouldn’t pay, and I answered it and he wanted to know when they were going to make their month-payment, and I said, ‘They ain’t nothing to pay with, so you don’t need to expect!’ and shut off on him. And they got debts all over the county for this and that, and Max borrow ten dollars last night, but I might as well have give him it for a gift!”

  She was lonely, too, she told me, and said that the other boys didn’t come out on Sundays like they used to, because Lena didn’t have anything to do with them and looked mad and sag-faced when they came, and went off upstairs and ate by herself; and Hilda didn’t come out much either, because Lena acted so nasty to her once on account of Hilda’s opening up the new ice-box door—the one that wasn’t paid for—just to see what she kept there, and Lena went into a rage and quarreled with her like she did with Max till, Mrs. Rathman said, she couldn’t stand it much longer.

  She told me all this in a single pouring, as one who’d been shut inside too long, and all her mild comfortableness was gone. I think she was glad to have me listen, although there was little that anyone could do or say. The farm looked going-apart, too, sliding to seed—the pond choked with water-lilies and the berry rows overgrown—with Max gone so much and the boys coming only once in a while, and Old Rathman not able to do anything but eat and shout and get his bed dirty, not knowing half the time what he did.

  I went back up the road, Old Rathman’s voice crying and shouting in my ear, and wondered if there was peace or safety anywhere on the earth.

  12

  IN AUGUST the smell of grapes poured up like a warm flood through the windows. But they ripened unevenly, with hard green balls all through the purple. The apples fell too soon, crackling in the dry grass,—gold summer apples mushed and brown, and the sour red winesaps with white flesh. The creek stopped running altogether, and the woods were full of dead things—leaf-dust and thorny vines brittle to the touch. It was chill and quiet sometimes in early mornings, but the heat returned, the sun blasting and fierce as ever, and the red plums fell like rain in the cindered grass. In places the grasshoppers left nothing but the white bones of weeds, stripped even of pale skin, and the corn-stalks looked like yellow skeletons. Most of the garden was lost. Even potatoes were black as after a frost or fire. The cucumbers curled up and wrinkled. Tomatoes rotting, with pale and smelly skins. The beans bleached and colorless.

  Day after day it went on. Hot wind, hot sun, hot nights and days, drying ponds and rivers, slowly, carefully killing whatever dared to thrust up a green leaf or shoot. Only the willows lived.

  There were times when I wanted to crumple up like an ash, or scream. It was unbearable, I tell you! Death in the hot wind, in the blazing sunlight and dry air. The fields scorched white.

  I saw the early goldenrod bloom feebly, like drifts of yellow pollen along the fence-rows, and I remembered that there was a time—it seemed a hundred years back—when the sight of goldenrod was enough to live and feed on. But now in these days it was only a blur beyond the thought of potatoes and the blasted fields and Kerrin’s incr
easing vagueness.—She had gone back to teach when school started in August, but seemed still uncertain of what she wanted, furious and balked that she could not reach or do things of which she had no clear idea herself.

  And then when it seemed that no worse or more terrible thing could come to us, there was another.

  The Huttons called us one morning. Asked if we could get word sent over to Kerrin’s school and have Whit Hutton come home. His uncle’d been killed, they said. The hay-hoist had broken and fallen on top of him. No ma’am, there was nothing that we could do. Just tell Whit to come right home.

  It was a long walk up to the school, and I wondered sometimes, plodding those miles of dust and living each moment only for the times when a tree cast its thin dry shade, why there was always such hurry with everyone to spread the news of a death. Why should we have to know so soon? Why was I struggling here through the hot noon sun so that Whit could know, only a few hours sooner, something the knowing of which would help neither him nor anyone else? Always when someone dies, before even their eyes are closed the bitter knowledge of it is rushed to those who will care the most, as though they who witnessed the death grudged even a half-hour’s kind oblivion to the rest. Besides, I knew Whit Hutton’s uncle, and knew that if a hay-hoist had fallen and smashed his head to a bloody pod it was because he had been too drunk to know where his feet were standing, and that now there was at least one less for Stella to feed and shove out at night. But now there would be a big funeral, and Wallace, who skirted a church all his life and passed it by like a quicksand-bog, would be laid with the other Huttons under a hideous family monument, the shadow of which looked always like a monstrous slop-pail squatting above the graves.

  There was no reason to hurry. Wally could not go off any more. Time now, hours of time for Whit to see the splunged-in head of his uncle and fill his ears with the story of how it happened, muttered and shrilled to him in a dozen ways. Back there in the time when Wally was still alive and making a gin-coated, sound-proof shield between himself and the hard necessity of thought—back there was the time for hurry. But only a man with a blue-gulched head and his slovenly heart stopped permanently at last could set anyone in motion. I wondered what it would mean to Whit—a holiday and a sort of eminence over the others, an extra slice of bread in the mornings now that fat old Wally had lost his appetite. Good mulch for a cornfield, Grant had said of him once. Things happened suddenly. Not when we fear or pray for them most, but not without cause or link somewhere if we could trace the invisible design. But was this so, after all? Suppose Grant should die? Where then would the pattern be? I could not think any longer of these things,—not when I really cared—not when the thought alone made my heart dry up like earth.

  The woods were stripped of leaves and underbrush. Locust trees thin and thorny, gnawed white with grasshopper mouths, and the trumpet-vines were naked of leaves. The cornfields looked as they did in late November.

  The schoolyard grass was dusty, worn bare as a chicken yard in patches, and the shadeless windows were grimy with finger marks. I walked up quiet and stood in the door. None of us had been over to Kerrin’s school since it had opened this year. It was too hard to think up a way of coming that would not seem like spying. There would have been nothing more raw or suspicious-looking than for one of us to have come, reasonless, just to hear her teach. But she had been even worse this month and we were worried, wondering how she taught and what went on at the school. Early in August she had been more restless than ever and had gone sometimes with Grant when he took the milk to Union. But she never remembered the messages that we gave her, and delayed his coming back home again. Nor did she seem any happier in having gone away from the farm awhile; she said that nothing in Union differed much from what was out in the barns. She’d seemed glad at first to be back at school, but was queerly reluctant to tell about her teaching. She talked at first a good deal about entertainments the children were going to give, and would sit with her face dark and intent as if she were thinking out all the plays and recitals in her mind. “I’ve got to plan,” she’d keep saying, and then stare off at the air, forgetting about it all. She refused to tell us how things went on, what the children said or did. “They learn. I see that they learn, all right. What else is to say? What is it you want to know?—how the room smelt?—who kicked who?—how dumb Hutton’s kids can be? Maybe you’d like a diagram of their dirt!” Then she’d go off and leave us, refusing to talk any more. Mother’d begun to look strained and depressed, as if something were going back on her and peace getting harder and harder to find. She watched Kerrin, knowing how useless it was to try and talk with her or come near to even the rim of truth unless Kerrin unconsciously betrayed it. “You ought to go over and see her sometime at school,” she told me. “Think of some reason for going there while she’s at work.”

  But till now there had been no reason. And I wished to God sometimes afterward that there had never been any excuse for going. . . . Kerrin was at the desk, but didn’t see me. She stared down at her book and mumbled out questions to the class. It was hot almost to oven-heat under the roof, and her hair was damp, lay flat on her head like a heavy scum. She asked the questions fast without looking up and not waiting to hear the answers given. “That’s right,” she’d say, and go on to the next one. The children squirmed or slept in their seats, but did not whisper. It was queer—their silence and Kerrin’s not looking up. Even here in the shadowless light of full sun there was something about it all that made me cold and sick. It came to me that they were afraid to talk. They were used to her doing this!

  For five minutes Kerrin rushed on with her questions, then slammed the book shut quickly. She looked up and saw me without at first knowing who it was. I saw the blood wash up her face in a tide and go away leaving only the soiled, burnt color of her skin. She was angry and nervous as if she’d been caught in some nasty thing. “When did you sneak up here? Who sent you?” she kept asking before I had a chance to say. She came to the door, and her thin face looked blotched and ugly out in the glaring light. Even when I explained to her why I’d come, and she called out Whit to tell him, it was more the shock of my coming than the news of Old Wally’s death that concerned her. “Who sent you?” she asked. “What’d you sneak up here for? Why didn’t they come themselves?”

  When Whit came outside she told him to go on home. “Your folks called up. You’ve got to go home.” The boy looked scared and sullen, and didn’t seem to believe her. “Your uncle’s dead,” she told him. “Hay-hoist knocked him off.” She seemed almost to take a malicious delight in telling it to him that way. Whit stared at us, then started off down the road like a crazy rabbit. I called out after him not to run, that he’d die in the sun, but he didn’t hear.

  “Wally won’t leave!” Kerrin shouted. “He’ll wait—no need to hurry!” She burst out laughing, then turned back at me. “The show’s over,” she said. “You don’t have to hang around any more, do you? Or maybe you’ll think up something else to say?”

  “That’s all,” I said. “I have to go back right now. I could have waited to let him know, but they’d have been angry—outraged—if he hadn’t gotten the message now.—What’s wrong with my coming, Kerrin?” I knew it was useless to ask her this—that she was beyond all questioning—but I couldn’t resist, couldn’t keep back this last attempt to treat her as one who could still hear reasoning. It only made her more angry, though.

  “You wanted to see if I was here, wanted excuse to see me teaching! Whit could have waited. You just wanted to come and watch me.—That’s all that you ever do anyway, just watch and spy over people.—You’d be afraid to do anything yourself! What’ve you ever done that’s hard? What’ve you ever known but your everlasting baking and books?—your sweet little leaves and weeds!” Her voice kept getting louder till it was almost a shout. Loud and foolish out in the dusty yard. Then before I could answer she turned inside and shut the door.

  I went back down the road, forgetting even the dust and h
eat. I remember now the elm-saplings’ dusty grey and the naked vines, but could think of nothing but Kerrin then.

  When I told Mother what I’d seen, she didn’t say anything at first, but just sat down on the porch, too tired and heavy to stand any longer. It was six o’clock but the sun was still hot as noon, the vines dead on the pillars—only strings left with a few dry leaves. When the cows moved near the barn, dust flew up in thick clouds and settled back ankle-deep in the hoof marks.

  “We ought to tell them now,” Mother said at last. “If she isn’t teaching their children. If she isn’t responsible any more.”

  “They’ll find it out soon enough,” I said. “She’ll never listen to us. There’s nothing that we can do or say. They’ll find it out from the children and make her go.” It sounded crude and indifferent, put in words. It was the truth, but the truth without all the fear and meaning and worry that lay underneath it. We could feel so much, but talk only in bald plain words together. I had a quick and unbearable vision of how things were going to be when Kerrin was home all day, made worse by the humiliation of being asked to go. I wondered, too, how we were going to do without her money. Poor Dad, harassed with debt and drouth already, would have to find some substitute for her crabbed but welcome dole. There was enough hate, enough fear, without this coming, too—one thing following another until it seemed impossible to suffer more. I remembered the awful words in Lear: “The worst is not so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” Already this year I’d cried, This is enough! uncounted times, and the end had never come.

  “Tomorrow you’ll have to go see the board,” Mother said. “They’ll have to find someone else for her place.”

  I wished that tomorrow would never come.

  13