Now in November (17 page)

I looked back once and saw the black, smouldering mess, and there was the crash of a dead branch falling, and the cinders rising up in a cloud around it. This behind us; and in front of us the fear for Mother, and everything blurred in an ache of tiredness. Father stumbled on ahead and I heard him muttering
Mother's name to himself, repeating it over like an oath or prayer, and once he blurted it out aloud when he blundered against a stone.

We saw the doctor had come and there was a lamp in her room, a drained and sickly yellow in the coming light outside. Father stopped at the door and took off his shoes, picking the buckets up as in a mechanical, meaningless rite. When the doctor came out, he went with him to the car and stood there a long time talking and listening, his eyes on the ground.

There were the cows still to be milked, everything still to be done. The sky cloudless, heat coming already in the air. The warm mugginess of sun through mist.—I went out in a daze of tiredness, but Kerrin was there already, quick and excited as if the fire had got inside her and behind her eyes, and she kept jerking her arms around and shouting at the horses. She started to let them out, and I told her that Dad might need them today. Then she turned and howled about having to give the horses water, although there was none in the pasture where she was driving them. I went out to shut the gate and came back and saw Grant fumbling at a rope, with one hand trying to unfasten it, the other stuck out stiff, black except for
the fence-tear ripped across it. Kerrin was with him, and what happened came so swiftly that it was like a quick fierce vision more than a thing that was real. She pried at the knot he couldn't loosen, but it was pulled too hard, and then grabbed at his knife and hacked the knot loose with a ragged sawing. Grant snatched at her hand to stop her. “Don't ruin the rope,” he warned. “—You'll cut yourself!”

She jerked back from him, his hand on her wrist, with the knife still clenched in her fingers, then suddenly twisted her arm behind her so that his own followed and all her thin, dangling body was pressed up hard against him, one arm over his shoulders and her face in his black, scarred neck. I could see Grant's face and the swift look on it, and then in less than the time of seeing he dropped her wrist and she fell back, but still with one hand on his arm and the knife clenched hard in the other. I looked up and saw Father standing in the door, his face still red and wild-looking from the fire, purple-spotted and flushed, and his hair singed across where a branch had struck it.

“What're you doing there?” he shouted. “Why ain't you working, Grant? What're you doing there with Kerrin?”

“Saving a rope,” Grant said and laughed. He would have said more, but Kerrin suddenly clenched his arm and, half-turning, hurled the knife at Father, all the old hate come to her eyes again, and screaming out words that I'd heard only once in life before. The knife went wide, struck slant-wise against the wall and fell back in the dust.

Now remembering what happened, looking back on it in these four months' time, through the blur of all that has come to us since, everything seems like a dusty smear of feet, and Father lurching toward Kerrin, and Grant's arm against him, knocking him back against the wall, and Kerrin's high voice,—“You kill him, Grant!”—and then Grant standing back, not touching Father and shouting at her to go and get out fast. Then Kerrin running—not because she was afraid of Father, being beyond fear, and everything swallowed up by hate—but because of the sound—the cold, fierce ring in Grant's voice. She ran past Father, slumped down panting where the harness hung, and I saw her hand dart down and snatch something off the floor.

Father straightened up and went out back toward
the house, not following Kerrin, but as if he'd forgotten why he'd come.

Grant picked up the rope and threw it away. “What'll she do now, Marget?” he asked me, and started searching along the wall for the knife.

“She took it,” I told him; and Grant saw what I thought but didn't say. We went out after her then, Grant half-dragging me over the stones. I was too tired to think or care, but knew that there was this to be done and followed him, feeling his heavy hand more than either the sun or fear.

17

WHEN I remembered it afterward and the thought had grown more accustomed through necessity, and the need to keep a hard layer of calmness between me and the dark that kept coming up like a tide, I was glad this had happened when it did, and I knew after all that her death was the one good thing God did. There was no place for her. If we had had money, we might have sent her away. She never belonged with us, and maybe there is no place on earth for people
like her. I was glad she had died. I could not feel any other way about it. Something had hardened and dried up in me in those last few months. Something that had been hardening before, all through the rest of our pinched and scrawling life.

It was the way we found her and the awful completeness of death that came as a shock. It was the first time I had ever seen Kerrin quiet. Even in sleep she used to move and twist like a restless snake, and when awake her hands and eyes were never still. Twitching and moving back and forth. But now she was absolutely quiet. . . . We found her back of the sheep barn and near the water-trough. It was after a long time of searching, and sometimes Grant called her but there was no answer, and we began to think she had gone off in the woods when suddenly we came on her lying against the barn wall, with one arm fallen across the trough, and the blood from her wrist staining the shallow water.

Grant knelt down by her and then looked up. She was dead already, and her skin drawn tight as paper over her cheeks. So thin it was almost like finding the hard bones of her, and the rest gone to dust already. I could not cry; but Grant's face was less hard, and
when he picked her up there was no disgust or shrinking in it, and he carried her as he would have carried a child or a little hound.

Dad took it hard. More for the swift, spectacular way she had done it, outraging decency and precedent, than because of any belated love. If he saw this as a last desperate taunt or felt himself at all to blame, he did not show it. He was out in the barn again when we came back, milking with a dogged steadiness. He had eaten nothing and washed only his hands, huge and red like gloves on the end of his blackened arms. “Get out,” he mumbled at Grant, then saw what it was he carried. “Who did this, Marget?” he kept asking. “What happened to her?” He could not believe she had killed herself. A raw, unnatural thing. A thing no girl had a right to do. Then he turned toward Grant and accused him of betraying her. Worked himself up in a terrible rage. But Grant was quiet, listened to him as to a furious child, and when he was through asked if he thought that Mrs. Haldmarne should know or if we could keep it from her.

“Don't tell her,” I said. “Not unless she asks.”

“What d'ya mean?” Father said, loud but not shouting any more. “Ain't she a right to know about her
own children? Ain't she a right to know what's been going on?” Then suddenly he changed and sat down. “Go on—do what you want. Lie to her. I don't care. Get me some food, Marget; I ain't coming in to eat.”

Merle cried, but was not afraid to touch her. She combed Kerrin's messy red hair and covered her wrists with a towel. We did not tell Mother. She was too blind and sick to come see her anyway, and had not even noticed the doctor's coming.

Late in the day the coroner had come, but she did not notice him either.

“Kerrin was sick,” I told the man, “—sick in her head. She'd been that way a long time. It was the fire and Mother's being burned and her thinking that Mother was going to die that made her do it.”

Father didn't say anything much, but sat and looked at the man, sullenly and defying him to find out more. Grant sat near Merle and watched him writing the paper out:
Kerrin Haldmarne . . . dead of her own hand. . . . Admitted suicide
. Once Grant turned and looked at Merle sitting there serious and unconscious of him as though he were not there, intent only on seeing the paper signed, all of us exonerated and free
of scandal or law. Grant looked at her, and then down at his hands; and I heard his voice again in my mind, the sound of it pushed unexpectedly from him in despair one night.—“Marget, isn't there anything I can do? It's like being half-crucified sometimes!” How could I tell him who knew one answer only?

Outside was the hot windless air, the dead elm branch against the sky, and the point of a buzzard drifting. Even then out of old habit my eyes went searching for clouds. And here in the hot still room—all of us sitting embarrassed, hating this man who neither believed us nor was able to prove a lie. Then at last he got up and stuffed his papers away, and Merle asked him if he would have anything to eat, hating him but knowing what Mother would have done. He said yes,—if it made no trouble. “No trouble,” Merle said. “It's already made.” She pulled the coffee-pot off the stove and cut him some cake. It was dark and crumbling, and she ate a sliver herself, absently, licking the crumbs from her palm, then handed some over to Grant, looking at him, her eyes impersonal and yet with a kind of pity. Grant took a thin piece but only rubbed it together in his hand. There was something ghastly and unreal about it all, like a funeral
supper or a wake. I wished to God that the man would get out and go.

He ate two pieces, and I could not help thinking of how the molasses was nearly gone already, and only a little sugar left, and I hated him for eating our food. “Thanks,” he said to Merle, got up and wiped his mouth. We made him nervous, sitting around this way. Nobody said anything much but Merle, and once Father asked him if corn might be going up. “Don't know, that's not my line,” he answered. “It's high enough now for the ones that have to buy. You farmers have got stuff to eat anyway. That's something, ent it?”

He left at last, and by the time he was gone there was the milking to start again, and supper still to be gotten; and there was relief in doing these stale and familiar things.

18

KERRIN was buried up in the old Haldmarne lot. There was no funeral, thank God.

The night after she was buried, Grant came down while I was watering the sheep. He stood there watching
and seemed a little at peace. It was quiet and getting dark. Then he spoke suddenly and with anger, watching the small dust under their feet. “Remember what Merle said about Max once?—that he liked to be with the sheep and hogs because they were things that were even more stupid than himself? That's why I like it, I guess. There's a mild irony in being wiser than sheep, at least.”

“There's more than that to it, Grant,” I said. “More for
you
, anyway—” It seemed an empty and obvious thing to say. Of no help. But I had never seen him like this before. Grant had never been arrogant, but had never before been so bitter at himself. It made me afraid, because he seemed to make of himself another and lesser man. And I wanted to believe in his strength, to feel that somewhere things were all right. I didn't want to believe what I knew.

“They trust you; there's a healing in that,” I told him.

“They'd trust anything,” Grant said. “Anything that's human.”

I wished he would go and get out of sight. Stop being there, so near that I almost stumbled against him with the bucket, but all of a life away.

Then he told me he was leaving for good next week.

“On account of Dad?” I asked him.

“More on account of Merle,” he said.

I asked him where he would go. I can hear the words now,—quiet, standing off by themselves, having nothing to do with my hot, sick heart. “Where will you go, Grant? What will Dad do?”

“I'll go back up-state,” he said. “Find a place somewhere. Max'll come back and help you. He's out of a job again.”

“Max made a good worker sometimes,” I said. I dribbled out the last bucket and hung it on the nail. I could not say “God keep you!” It kept getting darker there near the stalls, and something in me cracking and straining, wanting to do what Kerrin had done, forget everything else and do just that, touch him and get what sour comfort there'd be in this;—and there was the awful love, the desire shut back, sick in the throat. . . . Let me go—let me out!—O God please! . . . and the mind sitting there cold and hard and yet fearful: You can't do this . . . you can't do it . . . you can't.—It's a lie that the body is a prison! It's the mind, I tell you!—always the cold, strong mind that's jailer. I felt something hammering in my throat, and
my hands were shaking together like old leaves. I ran out through the shed and left him. I don't know what he thought. I was crying, and it hurt to cry. I was sick and hating because I loved him.

19

THE day that Grant left was like all the rest. Dust and heat and the ugliness of dying maples. I told myself I was glad he was going. That there was a dignity in death. This half-life was too much to bear, the shame of betrayal too much to fear. I would rather have died than have them find out how much I loved him. . . . This was a foolish pride. Who was I, after all, that it made any difference what I thought? What had I to hold inviolate? . . . Now there'll be peace, I told myself. I can learn to accept, feel free to begin again and rebuild life on something else, on something more than the sight of him, which had been a bitter sufficiency until then. I must have been dried with drouth. I couldn't feel any more those days. I'd see things and do them and see sometimes the look on Grant's face when he talked to Merle. I'd think—he's going next week; but it was as if I was thinking
of someone else, known by name only and no concern of mine. Father said he was glad Grant was going, and that he could manage well enough by himself. He knew that this was a lie, but pretended it for the sake of some dignity, and in himself dreaded being alone with us again.