Now in November (18 page)

Grant did the milking that night, and came on the porch to say goodbye while Father was out in the dairy.—There were things, I suppose, I could have said. But I felt like a stranger suddenly, and as though Grant had never spoken to me of his loving Merle or any of all the things we had talked about.

“Where's Merle, Marget?” he asked; and then, “Never mind, don't call her.” He put out his hand in an awkward, formal way, but laughed. “Goodbye, Marget,” he said. “I hope to God your mother is better soon!”

“She'll be,” I said. “I don't ever doubt it, Grant.” I thought that I said, “Come back when you can,” but must only have felt the words. Grant stood there looking down at me with his old kindly smile, supposing I had started to speak but never finished. Then, when I only stood there, he put out his hand again.

“No farmer's ever going to have a soft time,” he said, “but I wish it would come out easier for you.”

“We'll get along,” I told him. “It's a pleasanter way of losing money than most.”

He laughed and went out, but stopped by the gate where Merle was. She turned and went down the fence-row with him toward the road, and he waved his hat once before they got out of sight.

I went inside and stared at the jelly-glasses and around the room, and picked up a ball of dust near the table-leg, seeing them plainly and not at all. Then I went back to Mother's room when I heard her speak.

PART THREE
   
YEAR'S END

1

HE WAS gone and I had to accept this, take it hard to myself and stop suffering. One doesn't die of loss. Only a part dies.

The fifth month of the drouth began with nothing but clouds and the taunt of an hour's drizzle. Nothing to soak the ground below an inch deep. September now and the fields more barren than in winter. The pastures where mules and hogs had been not even covered with dying grass. They were eaten to earth and looked like the hide of a mangy hound. Even the ironweed was withered. For a mile around there was nothing but ragweed in the fields, dust-green and heavy-pollened. Locust trees in the south woods died together. Small gold leaves sifted down and were covered with dust. A weird sick acre full of the dying twisted trees, and underneath them the dying ironweed-stalks. The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.

Mother got neither better nor worse. She just went on suffering. I do not think the doctor knew very much. When her skin turned black in one place, he began to look worried. “If she's healed,” Merle said, “it'll come more of her own will than out of this stuff he uses.” We hadn't the money to pay anyone else
even if there had been anyone else to come. I used to sit up at night beside her, and at first it was almost too hard. It was awful—the pain she suffered. Hours and days of agony enough to turn her mind, and yet she seldom said anything aloud. I thought sometimes I should scream out myself, suffering for her and half-crazy with pity and helplessness. But there is a merciful blind skin that comes over the heart at times. You can endure this much, and after that there come intervals of hardness. She would get well. I could believe nothing else, nor let myself pity or fear for her. Somehow I trusted that her death was a thing that could never come to us. The doctor said there was hope, and there were days when we thought she looked better and the burns seemed to cause less pain. There was no doubt, no fear in her own mind. She talked about what we would do this winter when there was less of the work outside.

Our life seemed only a long waiting for her to get well—a vacuum in which we moved and did things, but nothing was the same. I felt lost and Merle seemed suddenly grown older, as if waked from a living sleep. Not Grant's love or Kerrin's death had changed her as much as this. She missed Grant, but only as someone
to tilt against. Missed his dry and gritty humor. She knew why he'd gone and had never been quite so placid and easy after that night of the fire. But she did too much else to brood over this, and her mind was too full of Mother to leave any room for the thought of him. I say this, not knowing, but only as it seemed.—One night she walked for hours over the place and came back angry and restless still, which was strange for her who had only to smash up kindling and haul it in, to rid herself of these mind-swarmed gnats. “It's the dust—the damn dust—It gets in your marrow almost,” she said. “There's nothing left even to look at now!”

Father was pitiful in a way. He asked, “How is she?” each morning, and almost demanded with his eyes that we say she was well—entirely recovered. I think he expected it every morning. “No better” or “Just the same,” Merle would say, and he'd go out looking as though we'd betrayed him in some way.

The days were quiet with Kerrin and Grant gone. Only by getting away from the house and off in the fields sometimes could I keep sane and find life bearable. It was not a healing;—neither from earth nor love nor from any one thing alone comes healing,—but
without this I should have died. If I'd screamed and shrieked out that I couldn't bear it, they would have thought I'd gone mad; but it's the silence that's really madness, the holding quiet, holding still, going on as if everything were the same. There was no one to talk to. I could not add my own fear to Merle's, nor could we talk about Grant.

2

I WENT one night up to the pond in the north pasture. It was hot again even in the nights. The warm air was tired and dull, and it took a long time for the south wind to bring any coolness. It was a moon night and the stars pale. Even the constellations dim. I could see the dust on the leaves and feel it deep around my feet in the road. The corn-stalks looked like white skeletons. I remembered in a wasteful and sentimental way the nights I had come along this road and up through the drying pawpaw thicket with Grant. There was no touch of his to remember,—only his words; and words are cold, tomb-like things, lasting longer perhaps than even the strongest and most fierce touch, but stony things. There was little that
Grant hadn't seen or heard, and he used to talk a great deal because I was hungry to learn and know. I could remember these things, and the sound, heavy and blurring, of his voice, but they were no consolation now. The awful loneliness was worse than even in the first days when he was gone. . . . I went up and stood and stared at the water, black and moon-webbed, and the frog eyes coming out like sparks near the edge. It was shrunken, and slime over part.

. . . There ought to be some way of putting yourself
beyond pain. The days did it mostly, but it crept back and crawled up in darkness, thrust in hard when light was gone. I could sleep, and in the morning wake up and think “Tonight I can sleep again”—but this was no way to live!—the days only deserts crossed between night and night. I sat on the pond-edge and tried to think it out clearly but couldn't, and only wondered if Dad would remember the stalls tomorrow or if I would have to tell him again, and if the pole-beans were too dry, and if we killed one of Merle's geese how long it would last. I argued a long time with the doctor in my mind. I gave him five geese and the promise of a calf if it ever came. He kept refusing, and I carried on the long stupid conversation, staring
at the pond and knowing all the time I would pay him in money anyway and never mention even potatoes for exchange. Then I remembered the night I had come up here in April, six months ago. I could have laughed almost, thinking of my mild and foolish excitement then. “This year will be better . . . different!”—I took a wry pleasure in the irony of it.

But after a while the
whiteness and the night wind had made me feel more still. Almost at peace. Almost as though all these things were behind me.—Big poisoned shadows in a dream now finished.

I came back late and saw the light still in the window of Mother's room, and came near and heard that sharp, awful sound she made sometimes, like a needle thrust out from her throat. And everything was the same. Real and unfinished and still to be lived on through.

3

THE assessor came in October on a day when Dad was out ploughing an acre down near the creek-bottom where ground was something beside rock-dust. He had too much to do now that Grant was gone, but had asked no one else to help. “I can manage,” he told
me. “Everything's dead anyway. Only the cows to do.” The truck-garden looked like a graveyard with all the things still unburied, but there was still more than enough of work. He didn't seem able to concentrate or decide what he wanted to do. Things took him twice as long. “I got to whitewash,” he'd said that morning, spent half an hour getting his stuff together, then left it to plough this acre.

—Braille, the man said his name was. Brought us the papers to be filled. “You've got a lot of good land,” he told us. A big bald man with a nervous cackle and a kind enough way. “A good house, too.” Dad listed his cows and horses, and they sounded a lot written down. The plows and tractor . . . a hundred sheep . . . nine hogs . . . a hundred chickens. . . . “Where's your car?” Braille wanted to know. Wouldn't believe Dad when he said there wasn't any. “You folks are pretty well off,” he said. Looked at the orchard and the barns.

“Pretty well
out
,” Dad said. “Them barns are empty. That silo's only three-quarter full. I have to
buy
feed this winter. I borrowed two hundred to fix this dairy up, and have to pay you because it is, and make less than that off it a month.”

“It ain't encouraging,” the man said. “I saw a mule out there in the pasture you didn't list.”

“He ain't mine!” Dad shouted. “I'm pasturing him for Rathman.”

“I reckon you don't use him either?” Braille said. Looked at Dad and winked one eye. “Last farmer I visited had four strays,—just passin' through, he said, and he let 'em graze.—Maybe I'll drop around next week and see if they passed on yet!”

Dad didn't laugh. “I ain't got any money to pay taxes with,” he said. “You're wasting your time with all those figgers.”

“Where'd your school be?” Braille wanted to know. “Where'd your roads be if nobody wanted to pay?”

Dad spread out his hands and hunched his shoulders. “I don't know, man!” he said. “I don't care much now. All I want is a chance to live without shoveling out everything I can earn. What're all these things worth?” He pointed around at the farm. “They don't bring in what they cost!”

“You want'm, don't you?” Braille asked. “Ain't this where you want to live?—Well, you got to pay for it then.”

“You talk like living was sort of a sin,” Merle burst out. “Something a man had to do penance for!”

Braille looked blank as a board and shook his head. “No crime,” he said. “You just got to pay, that's all.”

“You get me some money,” Father said, “and I will. If a man's no income, how's he going to pay property-taxes?”

“I guess he can't,” Braille said. “But he's got to.” He rolled up his papers and got in the car. “Goodbye, you folks,” he said. “I got it all down, I reckon.”

“I reckon you have,” Merle answered. “I never would have believed we owned so much. It makes a man count his blessings!”

Braille grinned and drove off. He seemed a kind enough man. Not steel. Not a man intended to leave a trail of sick hate wherever he went.

Father stood staring after him, and then wandered off to the barn, talking and jerking at the bucket. It was awful to see him that way. Father once so sure of himself if nothing else,—now not fighting back any more. Fussing instead of storming, now. Wasting himself in petty hates, and riddled with worry.

4

HE SOLD most of the steers next week, hoping to make the taxes that way; and besides, the pastures were all gone dead. They weren't very fat, and we had to pay Max to take them in, and a lot went for express. If we'd bought them to fatten we would have lost everything; as it was, we got barely enough to buy soap and nails. I thought—and hoped—that Dad would break out in a shouting rage the night he added up his accounts. He had
sunk so deep in himself that it would have been a relief to hear him roar out or swear. But everything went in—the whole storm—inside himself. He chucked the book in the drawer and went outside to the barn.

Mother asked what had happened; she could tell by his walk alone how furious he was. I told her, but not everything. “He got less than he thought to,” I said.

Mother moved her hand in a painful, impatient way. “Why don't you say the rest, Marget? How much did he lose?”

“We made two dollars,” Merle told her, “off nineteen steers. The cattle-business is very good. Next
year we might try twenty and buy a big dish-mop in the fall.”

Mother looked worried. Her mind wandered off in a web of pain sometimes and she did not bother much over things, but she seemed clear and too able to suffer for other people that night. “Get him to rest more,” she said. “He's too wound up. Work brings so little anyway. He'll see that sometime. . . . Does he eat enough?”

He ate pretty well, I told her. Didn't add that there wouldn't be much
to
eat after a while.

She didn't seem satisfied, but was too tired to talk any more. “Tell him to rest,” she said again, and then was quiet, staring out of the window.

5