Now in November (5 page)

I wished that all the strength which she spent in hate and in searching for something she did not even name to herself had been ours to use. But I knew that
strength alone would never have helped us much, and even if we had raised nine farms we would have had less than an acre's return in money. Kerrin herself never cared whether or not this slough of debt was filled, and to her the land was only a place to stay in, and as lonely as peaks or islands are.

She spent most of her time now, as she used to do when we were children, reading—it seemed, almost everything that was piled up there on the shelves. She would lie with her hard brown face casting a shadow on the page, and go through the books that the grandfathers used to own—old books that had page after page without a new paragraph or picture, and filled with philosophies obscure and gloomy as were the bindings, but even more durable perhaps. She spent hours in reading them over and did not stop, as Merle and I did, at a certain page or time, or stop to do dishes and scrabble in earth to make a garden. She was never law or time bound, or thinking of how her eyes might hurt; and she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book.

Even if we had had more money, I doubt that Kerrin would have been satisfied.
She carried the root of
her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted. I knew
that she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father's (having long ago stopped even hoping for it), but some man's love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true. I knew it was this fierce restlessness, this desire and hunger that had led her—even after teaching school all day, and carrying up milk at night, and finishing all those things accumulated and undone as though tipped there from the day like a rubbish heap of the hours' leavings—to go out fox-hunting at night with the farmers, or walk alone, tramping the marsh grass and weeds or along the dim rutted roads until morning. I would crouch cold on these nights in bed or at the window, driven by some obsession to see her come and go, and could not sleep until the empty moon-patch on her bed was broken and I could see the light on her bony and polished arms.

I felt empty and thirsty, too, sometimes, dreaming
wild and impossible dreams, but was driven easily from them by the pattern of a shadow or a pot on the stove, and driven from them too by a wry sense of humor that made my mind leap always to see the vision's end. Not even on April nights heavy with grape smell, or in the moving of shadow-leaves could my mind forget the inevitable noon.

8

ON FATHER'S birthday this year, I walked up near to the old stone fence where we'd buried Cale. Merle and I had piled some of its rocks in a sort of cairn on top of his grave, and planted wild ginger there. We used to see Kerrin going up this hill-path sometimes, and once, years ago, we found her crying on top of the cairn and sneaked away, pretending not to see. It seemed queer to us who had never cried afterward but had loved him so much when alive—much more than she had, we thought. But now I'm not sure of it.—Kerrin had a strange way of not seeming to notice things or care about them, but years later we'd find the feeling was there, living and fierce, under a thin slab of indifference.

The stones were toppled over and wrenched apart by roots, but the wild ginger still covered it like the leaves of enormous ivy. I saw Kerrin down on the road below me, and wondered if she would come here to the cairn. She was curiously sentimental in some ways and played small parts for her own sake even when no one could see her, and it would have been like her to come here on this day. She went on past to the barn, though, and did not look up or turn.

We did not celebrate Father's birthday any more, but I would have liked to bring him back something from the woods, some foolish thing like a bud or stone, to make him know that I had remembered the day. But it was hard to give trivial things, and I wondered if after all I was glad that he was born and had any reason to make the day seem a special thing. If I had spent money for a present he would have been anxious over the cost and suspicious as always, demanding to know where it came from, and seeing the farm sold under our feet for the sake of a ten-cent tie.

We let this day go by without saying much, and I think he himself had forgotten the meaning of it;
but there was one thing at least this year that set it apart again from other days.

Father came up tired that night while Merle was peeling potatoes, cutting the skins off thick and stoutly, her mind full as always of some strange thing she had thought or memorized, and not noticing what she did. He smiled at her absently, more out of habit left from the days when she was small and her hair stood up rough and matted like weedy grass behind, than from any feeling of kindliness left now. He turned toward Mother and threw his hat on the table, mopped at his damp and rutted face. “Max isn't coming back,” he said. “It seems not to pay to work for me!” He looked at Mother as if it were she who had driven Max off or else had failed through some fault to hold him here.

It wasn't his bitter voice she noticed, though, or even the blame. All her concern was for the meaning of what he'd said. What it would mean to him and Max. “What's the matter, Arnold?” she asked. “What's wrong with Max?” She saw him sick, hurt to death, wagon-pitched and already dying. She lived in the lives of others as though she hadn't one of her own.

“Nothing's wrong with Max,” Father said. “He's gone where he'll get more pay. Gone to do road-work, and left me flat. I paid him for ploughing and was going to do corn on shares. I ain't the money to pay a man for that. Someone'll have to do it on shares.”

“Maybe you could sell it,” Mother said. “Pay someone to help and sell the corn this fall.”

Father laughed. A sound more like a snort or sneer, as though he were glad to have her mistaken. “If it's good,” he said, “so'll everyone else's be. Land'll be drowned in corn.—How's a man to know?” he burst out, exasperated. “You ought to be able to sell all the stuff you raise! Somebody needs it. A farm
ought to pay as good as a road. No road's going to feed a man!” He looked old—old and childish at the same time. As if he might burst out crying soon. It was awful—the rage he felt; but it wasn't the anger so much as the despair that made us afraid.

“Maybe Christian Ramsey could come,” Mother suggested. She put out the words with doubt, feeling her way along his mind.

“Christian's swamped under now. Got all his creek-bottom full. What'd he do with ten acres more?” He slapped the words at her raw.

“Grant Koven might do it then,” Mother said. She knew that nothing was ever as overwhelming or final as he seemed to think,—that if he would wait, instead of shouting, there'd be less to shout over in the end.

“No,” Father said. He shoved her suggestions away as though they were stupid thoughts that had come to him hours ago and been found of no use. He stared at his hands. Sullen and tired, the anger going out. Then he jerked his head toward Merle, saw the potatoes half-peeled with their skins still patched around, and asked when supper was going to be. “If you'd have it any time soon,” he muttered, “I'd make it over to Kovens' tonight.”

I was glad that Kerrin didn't come in that time. She made it a point to stay away, out in the barns or field, till supper was ready; and sometimes didn't come even then, but ate by herself, secret and ravenously. She would scoop the syrup of sweet potatoes out of the dish with her hands, and wipe out the roasting-pan with pieces of bread hacked off and ragged. Father stopped asking about her after a while and looked at her doubtfully when she did come in, suspecting her of some hidden reason. I never got used
to his sick impatience, and felt racked all the time with hate and pity. Even before, when we were younger, I'd sit and watch him sometimes at the table, when he sat there eating and leaving things on his plate and not saying much, with the tired look on his face that made me want to cry at times, although I was quick to hate him when he would turn on us suddenly and shout out: “Eat your dinner, you girls! Stop messing with your food!” But all the time I would feel us there on his shoulders, heavy as stone on his mind—all four of our lives to carry everywhere. And no money.

Kerrin said once he made her think of the mad King Lear, and wondered if after all the daughters were wholly wrong. “He was a wild old man and half-mad already. How could they reason with one like that?” she'd ask. She read the play with a sort of gloomy pleasure, and memorized pages off by heart—mostly the cold and rational words of Goneril, and then, more for the sound than anything else, the howling of Edgar on the heath. I was glad that she wasn't here, watching and thinking about him, this time while Father sat at the table and drummed with his fingers on the cloth, not hungry but tired and impatient.
When supper was done, he left for the Kovens' early.

I had never seen Grant, but Merle had, a long time ago when she was still little and he came through hunting a horse he'd lost. She didn't remember much except that the one he rode was tired, and he left it out by the barn, going away on foot. She gave it some water, and when he came back he took what was left and washed off its head and sides. His hands were as big as shovels, she said, but hadn't noticed much else. Kerrin would have remembered everything; she'd have remembered even the things he wore and whatever he'd said and a lot that he didn't say. Grant was about thirty-one, Mother said, and had been away from home for five years, working on ranches and in the mines after he'd finished school, but had come back now to his father's place. Bernard Koven had been a minister once, then he bought this land of his and went back to farming while he still had a tithe saved up and breath to make use of it. They owned only pasture land, not fit for much but mullein plants and grazing, and kept both steers and hogs. They did no dairying, or any of all those things that Father had started and was breaking his back to keep on doing—each by itself too much for one man alone.

I went down to the wood-pond by myself that night. It was cold and windy. Too cold almost for rain. The frogs sang loud enough to deafen, but stopped dead when I came. They sounded like old women cackling in the water. I stopped to listen, but could think of nothing except whether or not Grant would come, and wondered if he would be a man like Father. It was hard to think of another kind, and yet harder to think of him as young. It seemed strange, too, that we would have someone different to live with us, a person with knowledge that was taught, and one who had gone beyond this county and state, learning things by sight instead of just reading about them. Father had done this, too, but now it was as though these ten years of farming had blotted out all that was behind, and he was only a little different from those around us—the Ramseys and Huttons and Mayers who knew a great deal but saw it only from this one land-bound side.

It was miserably cold. Ground even at the pond-edge hard. No spring about anything, and even the wild plums dim like a dirty web. I felt excited, though, and full of a kind of nameless hope. This year, I thought, will be different . . . better.

I stood there long enough for the frogs to think I
had gone, and they started up again, grunting and rumbling a long way apart;—and then came the shrill, insane chorus, thrust up like spears of sound, but guttering away again into a silence.

9

I WONDERED a lot about Grant in those days before he came. Merle seemed only mildly interested, though, and hoped that he wouldn't eat very much. Kerrin said nothing at all about him and may not even have known that he was to come. She was never around when things were told, and then acted as if we had a conspiracy of silence against her. Once in those days I had a strange thought when I looked at Kerrin.—I thought that if I could look like her and know that nothing could ever change it—not sickness nor fear nor accident nor age, nor anything—that I should not care very much what happened, that nothing would worry me any more. Kerrin was beautiful in a dark, odd way, and made with a brown cold skin tight-stretched, and wild colty eyes. She would stand sometimes turning her face before the mirror, or spread her hands out through her hair that was more like a
thick red light than anything real. She'd crane and stretch her neck to see how the light looked smooth and syrupy over her cheeks, and it seemed sort of sad to me at times that all her loveliness was going to waste on just us, with none but a few shy stumbling fellows to see her, or farmers already married.

I felt little and mean in envying her and in wanting a beauty that nothing could ever change. I could not acknowledge it even to myself, but it was so. I used to wonder how men who had murdered or done crude and slimy things could go on living with the self which had made them do it still inside like a worm or ulcer; but now I could see how simple it was to make excuses.—How amazingly kind and tolerant we are to ourselves! What infinite patience we have!

I went and looked at my face in the glass. There was something wrong and dull in the lines of it. A pale smear with no life in the skin, and a mouth like a cut across. I was plain—O God, so plain! But still I had seen homelier people than I, and not minded them so much—loved some, in fact. I tried to console myself with this, but remembered that they had
strong
faces, though. We—I—seemed like a disease on earth compared with the other things. Our lives, buildings,
our thoughts even, a sort of sickness that earth endured. These were grotesque and morbid broodings, but they came back often in the unbearable cleanness of this spring.