Now in November (14 page)

“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 and
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.”

“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!”