"I thought I told you to come straight home from school."
"Teacher kept me."
"You been causing trouble?"
"I had to stay and make up an arithmetic test. I flunked it the first time."
"Not what I send you to school for."
"I know."
If Cletus didn't go to school at all he wouldn't care. It is the way things are here that matters. He can't grow up fast enough. When he is grown, there won't be anything his father can do that he can't do.
He is sitting at the kitchen table with his head bent over his arithmetic. He puts the end of his lead pencil in his mouth frequently so the numbers will be black instead of grey. The darkness outside presses against the windowpanes here also, but they are too accustomed to this to notice it.
"I must go home," Mr. Wilson says, and doesn't.
Except for the chores, all fanning is at a standstill. Snow lies deep on the ground and in much deeper drifts wherever it met with an obstruction. The wooden fence posts and the well roof are capped, and icicles hang from the gutters.
His father and Mr. Wilson are talking about the relative merits of clover and alfalfa as a cover crop, Cletus would like to follow this conversation but there are twelve problems and he has only done half of them. "What's nine times seven?" he asks his mother, who tells him and then rests her chin on Wayne's curls and utters the single word "Bedtime." Wayne wants Cletus to go upstairs with him.
"Why does he have to be such a baby? There's nothing upstairs that is going to hurt him."
"Oh, be nice and go with him. You were afraid of the dark once. You just don't remember."
So he closes his book and gets up from the table, though he hasn't finished the assignment and Teacher will probably be sore at him.
Teacher wasn't sore at him, as it turned out. She knows he is a gentle boy and tries hard.
The rain is drumming on the tin roof of the shed off the kitchen where the separator is, and where Cletus's mother makes them keep their work shoes so they won't track the barnyard mud and manure into the house. He ties his shoelaces and makes a dash for it, with the dog bounding at his heels. When they arrive at the horse barn his hair is plastered to his head and his shirt is sticking to his back. The dog gets as close to him as she can and then shakes herself.
"Thanks. How'd you like it if I did that to you?"
He doesn't really hold it against her and she doesn't look guilty. They both know it is just something she has to do because she is a dog. It is warm and dry in the barn and he soon stops shivering. He cleans out the stalls and puts down fresh hay for the horses and fills the water buckets, all the while enjoying the sight of the rain coming down on the plowed field beyond the open door.
In the night he gives Wayne a poke and says, "Move over, you're crowding me out of bed." Sometimes Cletus jabbers in his sleep. Mostly they lie curled together in what is not a very large bed sleeping the sleep of stones. The north wind howling around the corner of the house only serves to deepen this unknowing.
Dressing for church Clarence Smith puts on a clean white shirt and discovers that Fern hasn't washed his collars. And is angry with her. He has his duties to perform and she has hers, one of which is to see that he has clean clothes to put on.
The small country church is packed with his neighbors, all of whom are wearing clean collars. The giving out of the hymn number causes them to rise and add the droning of their country voices to the wheezing of the little organ. Since the preacher said that the point of the parables is mysterious and needs explaining, they have no choice but to believe him. The details—the great supper, the lost lamb, the unproductive vineyard, the unjust steward, the sower, and the seed sown secretly—they are familiar with and understand. Above the transparent dome they live and work under there is another even grander where they will reside in mansions waiting to receive them when they are done with farming forever.
What Clarence Smith sees as he helps his wife into the front seat of the buggy after church is a woman who in the sight of God is his lawfully wedded wife and owes him love, honor, and obedience. Other people, with nothing at stake, see that there is a look of sadness about her, as if she lives too much in the past or perhaps expects more of life than is reasonable.
VI
LLOYD WILSON’S STORY
Though he had brothers he was on good terms with, the person he turned to for companionship or when he had something weighing on his mind was the overserious man on the neighboring farm. After twelve years he found it hard to believe there had ever been a time when he and Clarence weren't friends. At night, in the immense darkness, the only light he could see came from the Smiths' house.
He remembered the day they came. A raw, wet, windy day in March. He was plowing next to the road when he saw an unfamiliar wagon piled high with stuff drive up the lane at Colonel Dowling's, and he threw the reins over the horse's neck and started across the fields. When he got to the house, the front door was unlocked and standing open but the new neighbors were still outside, looking around to see where they were—the man a little under average height, and a young woman with a baby. They'd been on the road since daybreak. They couldn't have been thirty yet, either of them, but already there were wrinkles in the man's forehead and at the corners of his eyes. His voice was low, and if he could indicate something by a gesture instead of speech, he did. And what crossed Lloyd Wilson's mind was how defenseless he seemed.
Saying "Easy . . . easy . . . now your side ... a little more . . . more ... a little more," the two men maneuvered a heavy wardrobe up the stairs and through a narrow doorway. You didn't have to be much of a judge of character to see that the woman had been hoping for something better and the man was being patient with her. She didn't seem to know what to do first. Brought up in town, he said to himself. And then, noticing how small her wrists were: "Here, ma'am, let me have that. It's too heavy for a woman to carry." As he handled their furniture and their crockery, and box after box of possessions they hadn't been able to part with, he found out things about them, that first day, that it would have taken him years to discover under ordinary circumstances. Poking the baby's stomach gently with his forefinger, he produced a smile. "Two of my own," he said as he turned away. He came upon the woman standing forlornly in the midst of a kitchen that had been stripped of everything, including the stove, and said, "My wife is expecting you folks for supper." She wasn't, but no matter. And anyways, they knew she couldn't be expecting them because nobody knew they were coming. When the others sat down to eat, Fern nursed her baby in the rocking chair in the parlor. Afterward, he walked the new neighbors back to their house and waited till they had lit the lamps.
In the county clerk's platbook the hundred and sixty acres that Lloyd Wilson farmed were listed as belonging to Mrs. Mildred Stroud. It did not trouble him, or at least it did not trouble him very much, that the cows were his and the grass they cropped was not. The rent he had to pay on the pasture acreage was not unreasonable. His father had had the place before him and had saved up enough money over the years so that when his health failed and he had to give up farming he could live out his days in town.
Mrs. Stroud was a woman in her early fifties with two unmarried daughters who lived at home and were kept in the dark about her financial affairs, as she had been kept in the dark about her husband’s—until he died suddenly and the president of the bank began to explain things to her. He started in as though speaking to a child and then had to pull himself up short. It had been his fixed opinion that all women are ignorant about money matters, but this woman didn’t happen to be, and the questions she put to him were just the questions he would have preferred not to answer. It was quite impossible to take advantage of her. Inadvertent mistakes didn’t escape her notice either. Like most extremely clever people, she underestimated the intelligence of others. She could have remarried and chose not to because it would have meant discussing what she did with her money.
She appeared at her farm frequently and
without giving her tenant any warning. If she did that, what would have been the point in her coming? When she pitched in to Lloyd Wilson for some piece of slackness, he cleared his throat and moistened his lips, as if he was about to argue with her, but instead he turned away, pretending that something a few feet to the right or left of them had engaged his attention at the moment. At other times, cap in hand, he was overly polite, in a way that could be taken for rudeness, but that she simply ignored. She knew, because she had made it her business to know everything about him, that if he hadn’t got his corn in by the time he should have it was probably because he was off planting somebody else’s corn—some neighbor who wasn’t able to do it himself. She could have made an issue of this and didn’t. In the end her corn got planted and she was never actually out of pocket. It was the principle of the thing that she objected to. As her tenant his first responsibility ought to be her. If she didn’t like the way he farmed she could ask him to leave and put some other tenant on the place instead, but they both knew that this wasn't about to happen.
The secret that Mildred Stroud managed to keep from him, though not from herself, was that she found him physically attractive. But she was fifteen years older than he was, and, knowing the cruelty of Lincoln gossip, didn't choose to be the subject of it. And anyway it was out of the question.
Chewing on a grass blade, he remarked—this was in the days when he and Clarence were still friends and he could say whatever came into his head, knowing it wouldn't be repeated or misunderstood—"A good wife is a woman who is always tired, suffers from backache and headaches, and moves away from her husband in bed because she doesn't want any more children." And Clarence supposed that it wasn't just any good wife he was speaking of.
What Lloyd Wilson didn't say (because there was nothing anybody could do about it anyway and why should he burden Clarence with his trouble, if you could call it that) was that he didn't seem capable any more of the kind of feelings he used to have. He was perfectly aware of his wife's good qualities. She worked like a slave, from morning till night, holding up her end of things. She was a good mother. There was no question about any of this. Sometimes he thought it was just that they were so used to each other. He knew how she felt about almost everything, and, most of the time, what she was going to say before she said it. If they had been brother and sister it wouldn't have been very different—except that she was jealous. If he so much as looked at another woman she acted as if he'd done something unforgivable. Once or twice she worked herself up to such a pitch that she went upstairs and started packing. He knew that such persuasion as he could muster was halfhearted and wouldn't convince her to change her mind. If she was bent on leaving him there was nothing he could do about it. She didn't leave him, she only threatened to. None of those women meant anything to him, he said. And with her face averted she said, "The trouble is, I don't mean anything to you either."
Whether he himself would have come to this conclusion if she hadn't embarrassed him by putting it into words, he couldn't say. All he knew was that he wished she hadn't said it. He was ready to provide for her and to treat her with respect, but he couldn't work up a semblance of the emotion that would have made her happy.
Between these crises they lived like any other married couple. You could not have told from her voice as she said, "I'm about to put things on the table, Lloyd," or his voice as he said, "Pass the salt and pepper, please," that there was anything wrong.
He wondered if other men felt the same way about their wives or if it was just him. He was almost forty years old and lately it had seemed to him that he had lived a long time and that just about everything that could happen to him had happened.
When his evening chores were done he walked over the hill and, leaning against a post in the cow barn, directed a steady stream of conversation at the back of Clarence's head. When Clarence and Victor carried the milk to the shed off the kitchen where the separator was, he followed them. And from there into the house. Anything to keep from going home. Sometimes he told himself he ought not to go to the Smiths' so often. He was afraid of becoming a nuisance, and still not quite able to stay away. One night, sitting in their kitchen, he tried to tell them how much their friendship meant to him, and then broke off in embarrassment, because anything he might say seemed so much less than he felt.
"You don't have to tell us," Fern said, smiling at him. "And anyway, it isn't as one-sided as you appear to think." Then she changed the subject.
He sat back, glad that he had spoken and glad she had stopped him from going on. He also recognized that what she said wasn't just politeness. They were themselves in front of him, as if he had assured them (he hadn't, but it was nevertheless true) that he didn't expect them to be anything they weren't. All this was altered irrevocably by a change in him so unexpected that it was as if it had happened without his knowing a thing about it. And after that he could not go on being natural in front of them.
He said silently (but nevertheless wanting to be heard) Clarence, you ought not to trust me .. . half expecting Clarence to answer Why not? If Clarence had, then he would have said Because all my life I’ve been a stranger to myself.
He hated himself for being weak, for having no will, but it wasn't that he didn't try to overcome the feelings he knew he shouldn't have. Time after time he thought he had overcome them, and it always turned out that he hadn't. Excuses to pay a visit to the barns (where she wouldn't be, so there was no harm in it) or to the house (where she would be) occurred to him constantly. He would reject four in a row and find himself hurriedly acting on the fifth. His feet took him there, without his consent. He might as well have given in in the first place.
Searching for a clue to her feelings, he was alert to the quality of her voice when she spoke to her children or Clarence. He knew when she was depressed. He knew also that like most married people she and Clarence quarreled sometimes. Did he imagine it or was it true that they got on better with each other and were more cheerful when he was around?
If he did what he knew he ought to do, which was not go there any more, Clarence would wonder why. So would she. The idea that she would think of him at all pleased him. All day long he thought about her. The cows sensed that he hardly knew what he was doing and turned their heads as far as their stanchions would permit and looked at him gravely.
He sighed, and then a moment later sighed again—deep sighs that seemed to come from as far down as they could come. To have escaped from that deadness, from the feeling that all he had to look forward to was more of the same . . .
But he was careful. He didn't make a simple remark without rehearsing it beforehand. And he continually removed the expression from his face lest it be the wrong one, and give him away. He also avoided any strong light, such as the lamp on the kitchen table. Sometimes a weakness overcame him, his legs were unstrung, and he had to find some place to sit down, but this was easy enough to disguise. It was his voice that gave him the most trouble. It sounded false to him and not like his voice at all.
His wife yawned and then yawned again a minute later, and put the cover on her workbasket and gathered up her mending. "I declare, it's snowing," she said. She got up and went into the bedroom, and he sat looking at the snow, which was coming down in big cottony flakes.
"Aren't you coming, Lloyd?"
He turned the wick down until the lamp sputtered and went out. Then he went into the next room and, sitting on the edge of the bed, began to undress. As long as she doesn't know how 1 feel about her ...
He kissed her eyelids.
"Now, why would you want to do a thing like that?" Clarence asked.
"Well, land is cheap, for one thing. I could own my own farm and raise what I pleased on it, and not have to share the profits."
"Or the losses, in a bad year. You've been on the Stroud place all your life. It's home to you. You know everybody for miles around and they know you. If you get into trouble, you can expect help."
"True enough," Lloyd Wilson said so
berly. He knew that if Clarence did not say "help from me" it was because he didn't want to remind him how beholden he was.
"Who knows what it is like in Iowa. You may find that people are friendly out there and then again they may not be."
What Fern felt, he could not make out. Nothing, maybe. Maybe she resented his friendship with Clarence and would be glad if he moved away.
She was standing at the stove, with an apron on, rinsing the supper dishes in a pan of hot water. She had moved the lamp to a shelf higher than her head and the light fell on the nape of her neck, the place that in women and small children always seemed to express their vulnerability. Looking at the soft blond hairs that had escaped from the comb, he thought of all those people who, because of their religion, had knelt down in great perturbation of mind and had their heads chopped off. His heart was flooded with love for her and he lost the thread of what Clarence was saying.
Riding into town with him, Clarence said, "Fern's as cross as a bear this morning."
So Long, See You Tomorrow Page 7
