Now in November (10 page)

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 TWO
   
THE 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.

It was getting dark by then and Grant saddled the horse for me. “Ramsey'll loan the mule,” he said. “Don't let Lucia give you their whole farm too.”

2

I RODE the three miles thinking a good deal of Grant, and did not notice whether or not they seemed long. There was a kind of painful pleasure in thinking about his face—the gaunt nose and his plain eyes that saw a lot more than Father or even than Merle did. I saw him standing stooped over the boiling cherries, tasting to please her—and himself as much, his big hands holding the spoon like a spade; and Merle with her face a furious red from the steam, making her eyes a sudden unnatural blue, glaring at him with a dare to criticize, and great bursts of laughter at seeing his puckered, grimacing mouth. It seemed strange to me that she did not realize what was written all through and over him,—and strange that she did not love him anyway. I did not want to see Merle humble with love for any man, but I wished she could give him something more than this casual caring, and feel more than a need for someone to tilt against. He might just as well have been one of us and lived here years for all that he seemed to make her feel. I wished she could see and give back something, and hated to think that Grant might suffer sometime the way I
had—and still did at times. . . . I have one thing at least to be thankful for out of all the petty and swarming thoughts: I have never been jealous of Merle, never prayed that Grant would not care about her; have even tried to make her understand him better sometimes. This is not much, but it is a little anyway.

I rode in the strange mixed smell of hay and darkness, weeds and the cattle lots, and farther on the heavy malt smell of the oat fields down near Ramsey's. I thought to myself—if anything could fortify me against whatever was to come (and there were times when, in spite of an everlasting hope, I felt we were moving toward some awful and final thing), it would have to be the small and eternal things—the whip-poor-wills' long liquid howling near the cave . . . the shape of young mules against the ridge, moving lighter than bucks across the pasture . . . things like the chorus of cicadas, and the ponds stained red in evenings. . . . As long as I can see, I thought, I shall never go utterly starved or thirsty, or want to die . . . and I thought this because I did not know, because I still had hope that Grant was not beyond me, and because I could still see him and hear him at least. I was afraid, though, and prayed.—Lord make me satisfied
with small things. Make me content to live on the outside of life. God make me love the rind! . . .

There was a light at Ramsey's, and I heard Ned hollering: “G'wan!—g'wan—let me up! Get yoh butts outa ma face, Chahley,” and I heard their wild savage singing and Lucia's laugh. No sound from Christian, though. “A deep-taking man,” Lucia says. And a rare one, a Negro quiet almost to dumbness, loving land more than company.

Lucia hoisted herself up and lighted a candle, and the children came up cautiously, shy and giggling to each other. They made faces and ran away shrieking, except Henry who stood and stared, half-hidden behind Lucia's enormous arm. “Henry's like Chrishun,” Lucia said. “Follows him everywhere quiet.”

“I hoed,” Henry announced in a loud burst, and disappeared in an agony of shame behind her skirt. Christian sat hunched and tight in his chair, the candle making his face like a black carved skull, and a reflection of fire in the stained balls of his eyes. He brooded and seemed absorbed in something beyond us both, and Lucia did all the talking, her voice a deep and comforting boom.

There were two rooms in the house (one a sort of shed for the dogs and chickens), and around us the beds and sacking bulged dimly in the corners. There were a stove and table and the close, rich smell of air used and over-used and mixed with stale coffee and soup. The walls were covered with pictures: torn Bible illustrations—The Good Shepherd and The Widow's Mite—and advertisements for liver medicine. The corners were deep with old newspapers stacked up for the stove, and bundles of kindling salvaged on Christian's trips to town were chucked underneath. It was thick inside, and mosquitoes whined in and out of the torn screens, but Lucia rocked calmly and seemed unconscious of all their stings. Round silver balls of perspiration stood out on her face and dripped down her polished cheeks like placid tears.

For ten years Ramsey had rented land and expected to buy, but all that he ever did was make his rent-money and put up half the crop to go over the winter. In five years they saved fifty dollars and then had to spend it to get a new team. But every spring Lucia boomed out that
this
was the year they were going to make it. Ramsey'd mutter the same thing, too, and
all that they ever did was pay the rent. . . . I told them I'd come for help and they looked surprised, and all of a sudden it occurred to me that we seemed to them as the Rathmans did to us. Safe. Comfortable. Giving appearance of richness, with our dairy and corn and chickens, our steers and team and orchard—although each thing was barely paying to keep itself. . . . I told them about the gall, and Lucia looked back at Christian, waiting for him to say. She'd have given us both the mules, herself, and everything else she could lay her hands on if I had asked her alone.

Christian stared down at his hands and answered slow, as if it were effort to talk. “You kin have them both,” he said. “They don' pull good sepurate.—It don' matter about you helpin' in the fall.”

“Chrishun don' think we'll be here to cut that corn,” Lucia said. “We can't make any rent-payments ovah to Turner's. We got to pay him in cash and half the crop, and we ain't
got
any cash this yeah.—He ain't goin' to root us out, though! Ah'm goin' stick heah tight! Turner have to yank pretty hard to get
this
big black tick out of his ol' houn's ear!”