Now in November (13 page)

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 herself. 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.

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?”

Ramsey 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.'”