The Morning and the Evening (2 page)

One of the ladies leaned toward the owner. “He always tries to sing when he hears music,” she explained. The movie man nodded condescendingly.

Jake stopped crying when the men yelled at him. He understood the tone of their voices. The music quieted, faded, but he sat bent over on his campstool with his head down, his hands still holding his ears.

The men spoke to him in the same tone whenever he saw them in town, leaning back in straight-legged chairs against the store fronts, hounds sleeping in circles at their feet. He had long wanted a dog; he would stop to ask the men where he could get one. As he leaned over to pat the soft warm bellies of their hounds, he would begin to tell them how he wanted a dog, too. Banging their chair legs to the porch, they would jump up and yell, “Get on away, Jake. Get him away from
my
bitch. Get on, stop that there moanin'.”

Then he would take himself away, telling them he would come back tomorrow to find out where he could get him a dog.

“Wake up, Jake.” Behind him, a man caught hold of his overalls, jerked him up. His eyes opened, astonished. He saw the tent over his head, felt the people around him in the dark, was aware of a mosquito; he remembered something had jerked him, a voice had said something. He listened to the breathing around him.

Between the light coming down the aisle he saw faces, all looking straight ahead. He looked ahead too. He saw the picture, remembered he had seen it before, and realized mutely that this was why he was there, to look at the picture. He looked at it intently.

But he felt tired, as if he had been running for a long time; he couldn't think what the picture was—it was only black-and-white shadows. His mouth fell open and he stared straight ahead of himself.

The thin childish voice next to him began to whisper in his ear quietly, slowly, “They're riding over the hill to rustle the cows. They're the badmen.”

Jake nodded his head slowly with each word, shook it at the last.

His mother had primed him. She sat him down for a long time before he came and told him what he would see; having been to the movie three summers ago, she knew. “You'll like the cows, the horses, the hills,” she said, and made him nod his head. “But not the badmen.” Then she made him shake it. His mother never let him talk, though he wanted to. “You don't have to talk, son,” she would say. “You don't have to. Be quiet now.”

It was hotter than ever in the tent now, as if twenty-five people sitting still for an hour had breathed up all the air. Next to the child a woman began to fan herself, and when she leaned around and fanned the child too, Jake felt a small breeze; he let himself feel it and smell the smell that came with it, sweet, the way his mother smelled when she put powder on her face.

The woman looked away and he followed her gaze. He saw a man riding a horse, coming slowly down a road. Everyone in the crowd began to clap; the little boys in the back whistled. Jake smiled, then he laughed, cupped his big pawlike hands together and pulled them apart, made a slapping sound like everyone else. He watched his hands going together, coming apart, making a noise; then the little-girl voice whispered, “Quit now,” and he quit.

He looked where the little girl looked, watched the man on the horse again. The man opened his mouth and began to sing. Jake rocked back and forth on his campstool as the man rocked back and forth on his horse, and he heard the singing inside him, smiling to himself. He had known for a long time that he could sing. Whenever he was alone he would sing, but he kept it a secret.

The man sang loudly and Jake grinned now, knowing the sounds in him to be the same as the man made. When the child next to him, lost in the movie, leaned against his shoulder, he turned and looked at her face, small, perspiring, open-mouthed; he saw her breath going in time to the music, and he remembered her voice touching his ear, her hand touching his face a long time ago, and it came to him suddenly to tell her he could sing. Softly, with closed eyes, he began to sing, wanting just this one small face to know his secret. Abruptly the face hissed close to his, snakelike, “Shhh, you shut up that moanin',” and he felt a breeze beat in his face very hard. He opened his eyes and looked into an angry face with a tongue shooting out like the snake's did, with eyes that were two hard slits. The woman had jerked the little girl away, was there in her place.

Jake turned away frightened, hunched up on his stool, keeping himself away, his song forgotten. Was he supposed to run? He did not know. He sat on in the dark, trembling until his back began to ache so he had to move. Cautiously he slid his feet from under the stool, gradually straightened his cramped legs; the face didn't turn on him. Stealthily then he eased out his back, sat up. Over the head in front of him he saw the movie again.

A man got off a horse, went up to a girl, stroked her long hair, talking softly. Jake's eyes followed the stroking up and down, and slowly his fingers began to curl, uncurl, against the rough knee of his overalls.

“Shh, shh,” the snake face said. Jake jumped, but the face was not looking at him; it was turned toward the back where the little boys hooted like owls.

He watched the stroking again—soft, soft, he knew, remembering Sarah Jane. He began to ache, remembering Sarah Jane.

“Sarah Jane, Sarah Jane,” he would moan softly over and over, stroking her. And she never moved, she never pulled away from him. She just listened to him. When he had finished all he had to say, she would look at him with unwavering eyes. Spent with telling at last, he would sit down then and, leaning his head into her stomach, begin to milk her. When the sweet, warm milk came, he would sometimes begin to cry, because of the stillness and the listening that was Sarah Jane; he would tell her then how she was the only one who would listen. But soon his mother would come running down to the cowshed, screaming, “Get away from her now, Jake. Get away!” And she would take him away. All the time going to the house he tried to tell her about Sarah Jane, but she would say, “Hush now, hush.” Then he would cry, looking back at Sarah Jane watching him with her calm brown eyes.

When the man stopped stroking, Jake's fingers hesitated, half curled. He sat waiting, but the screen flickered, the scene changed, and the man was gone. There were horses instead, pounding frightfully going over a hill, and the sound of gunshots. Not only the next face but all the faces hissed, and twenty-five pairs of feet thudded dully against the sawdust. Jake laughed, picked up one of his feet, then the other, set each down in the sawdust, stomping too.

Suddenly through a cloud of dust on the screen, he saw a cow face come toward him with wild frightened eyes, mooing loudly and mournfully. He stood up. “Sarah Jane, Sarah Jane,” he cried out, a gaunt figure waving mute and frantic arms before the onrushing herd of cattle.

“Sarah Jane, Sarah Jane,” he called again and again, beginning to run. The owner grabbed him by his crossed straps and one sleeve, dragged him down the light beam through the aisle of snickering faces, and out into the night. “God damn you, loon,” he muttered.

Jake pulled back toward the tent, but the man shook him hard; then Jake forgot about the tent. He stood bewildered, with the man's face breathing close to his. “You're not getting back in there,” the owner gritted out between his teeth.

With no thought left of what was inside the tent, Jake stood limply while the owner held him. Finally the owner released him and lit a cigarette, stood facing him, waiting to overcome his anger. “Just God damn you,” he said as he drew on the cigarette, which glowed faintly red against his face in the dark.

And this faint red glow stirred up, as much as possible, a memory in Jake. When he had seen the owner with the spotlight playing across his face, he had associated it with the one thing of color indelibly etched on his mind—the sunset—because he watched it daily, and now he knew that he had seen this face before with color on it. He began to tell the man. “Take your hands off me. Get on away,” the owner said, giving him a good shove before he threw away his cigarette and went on back into the tent.

Jake turned after him, knew from the tone of his voice not to follow, and stood holding on to the outside fold of the tent flap, beginning to tell the man about the sun going down red against a darkening sky. In a little while someone stuck his head out. “Shut up that noise and go home,” he said, and while the tent flap was open Jake glimpsed a man and a girl, heard music, saw a horse with its mane waving in the wind; then he was staring at nothing, with his nose up against the closed flap of the tent.

He turned, ran his hand over his nose where the rough tent had scratched it, and went on slowly down the faint road. The moon came out smiling from behind a cloud, opened up a white path; he followed it, listening to the staccato sounds from katydids hiding in the tall grass alongside the road, listening to the shrill loud screaming of locusts from somewhere overhead, listening to the stumbling craunch of his own feet on the gravel, all sounds.

Alone, he began to call up words from way inside him. A bird fluttered in one of the poplar trees, and he looked for it between the white leaves. It sang sleepily way up, and he went on. He went instinctively, not having to think where he was going. Because it was quiet the words came easily but formed slowly, one by one, and he waited for them to come as he walked.

When he had been in the quiet for about a mile, he began to remember: music. He stored up words to go with the music. After a while he remembered the horse, and he stored up words to go with the horse. He remembered the wind.

He turned out of the moonlight and went through the dark again, his feet following surely the thin side road.

When he saw the little house, with one lighted window, he went up to it and looked inside. A woman knelt by a bed, and he watched her. As she stood up and got into bed, he saw without surprise that it was his mother and knew he was home. His mother sat in the bed by the lamp and he knew she was waiting for him. He waited, watching her. The night sounds continued around him; they had become part of his hearing now, and he did not have to listen to them consciously. With the sounds around him, with the words inside him, he felt again the uncontrollable thing that guided him, and he wanted to make sounds too. He moved his hands out in a sweeping gesture, stood outside the window, nodded his head up and down, shook it once.

But the words still stirred him, wanting to be said. Suddenly he found himself going away from the window, and he went, went as if he were following himself.

He went quietly through the tall, dew-wet grass, felt it itch his leg, but he forgot it before he could remember to stop and scratch. He went on with the words carefully inside him. The music began, churned inside him with the words, words about the horse with its mane waving in the wind, and he held everything inside him together as much as he could, till the moment to tell them.

He found himself at the gate, lifted it and set it back in its rut. Then he went silently, smelling the ragweed, heard frog music, and he heard it and set it apart slowly from his own music. Instinctively he went on through the dark and circled wide around the place where he had seen the snake.

As he went down into the summer-dried ditch, came up again, the words jarred loose from his chest and he started running, telling them.

As he heard the first faint bell tinkle, he was running faster, telling about the wind, waving his arms.

He smelled the pasture for the first time as he came up to her, and he lay down immediately with his head on her soft flank. When he felt her stillness and her warm breath smelling of grass, he began to tell her about the music, and he knew, as much as he could, that through the long summer he would come here again and again.

Chapter Two

Jake's mother, standing at the kitchen window, saw him come up out of the potato cellar beneath the house, trip over the top of the ladder, and hit his chin sharply on a rock as he fell to the ground. But before she could move, he had gotten up. In one swift, unusual, sure movement, he collected the spilled potatoes.

Like one of those cartoon shows, she thought, when things spilled out of a person's arms jump back into them.

The blow on the chin had been quite hard, she saw now that he was directly beneath the window. Blood had appeared where the skin had broken open and a faintly blue lump had formed. He seemed either not to mind or to be completely oblivious to what had happened. His expression never changed. It was altogether concentrated on carrying the potatoes for her. He brought them up the back steps and dropped them into a basket. She smelled faintly the odor of dirt that arose from them. Then he went away again, down the back steps.

Soup simmering on the wood stove rattled the lid of its iron pot. Corn bread was baking in the oven. She stood in the kitchen full of heat and steam and thought of that dark cool cellar in the earth out of which Jake had just come. She would like to go down there and stay a long time, with perhaps a candle to light it by night. The fear of it she had once felt had passed gradually after so many years.

The wooden door of the cellar was of two parts that opened outward, and flush to the ground. It was thirty years ago she had gone down into the cellar and left one side of the door closed and locked on the outside. She had been in the farthest reaches selecting potatoes when suddenly she was closed completely into the earth.

Terrified, she had turned, and all she could see was a faint crack of daylight that was the outline of the door.

“Jake!” she had called.

But the same instinct which made her call made her call hollowly, tonelessly, and not loud enough for him to hear; he did not know how to open the door, and he did not know how to close and lock it either.

Dropping potatoes, she put her hands out blindly to the dark and made her way through it, across the damp earth floor, at each step feeling snakes slithering toward her worn and split-open shoes. She found the ladder and gripped it and went up quickly to the top. She crouched, her face as close as possible to the crack of daylight: security now and life itself. Once, she pushed without hope at the unyielding weight of the door.