Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (13 page)

He told Jotham to go out and harness up the greys, and for a moment he and Mattie had the kitchen to themselves. She had plunged the breakfast dishes into a tin dish-pan and was bending above it with her slim arms bared to the elbow, the
steam from the hot water beading her forehead and tightening her rough hair into little brown rings like the tendrils on the traveller’s joy.

Ethan stood looking at her, his heart in his throat. He wanted to say: ‘We shall never be alone again like this.’ Instead, he reached down his tobacco-pouch from a shelf of the dresser, put it into his pocket and said: ‘I guess I can make out to be home for dinner.’

She answered ‘All right, Ethan,’ and he heard her singing over the dishes as he went.

As soon as the sledge was loaded he meant to send Jotham back to the farm and hurry on foot into the village to buy the glue for the pickle-dish. With ordinary luck he should have had time to carry out this plan; but everything went wrong from the start. On the way over to the wood-lot one of the greys slipped on a glare of ice and cut his knee; and when they got him up again Jotham had to go back to the barn for a strip of rag to bind the cut. Then, when the loading finally began, a sleety rain was coming down once more, and the tree trunks were so slippery that it took twice as long as usual to lift them and get them in place on the sledge. It was what Jotham called a sour morning for work, and the horses, shivering and stamping under their wet blankets, seemed to like it as little as the men. It was long past the dinner-hour when the job was done, and Ethan had to give up going to the village because he wanted to lead the injured horse home and wash the cut himself.

He thought that by starting out again with the lumber as soon as he had finished his dinner he might get back to the farm with the glue before Jotham and the old sorrel had had time to fetch Zenobia from the Flats; but he knew the chance was a slight one. It turned on the state of the roads and on the possible lateness of the Bettsbridge train. He remembered afterward, with a grim flash of self-derision, what importance he had attached to the weighing of these probabilities …

As soon as dinner was over he set out again for the wood-lot, not daring to linger till Jotham Powell left. The hired man was still drying his wet feet at the stove, and Ethan could only
give Mattie a quick look as he said beneath his breath: ‘I’ll be back early.’

He fancied that she nodded her comprehension; and with that scant solace he had to trudge off through the rain.

He had driven his load half-way to the village when Jotham Powell overtook him, urging the reluctant sorrel toward the Flats. ‘I’ll have to hurry up to do it,’ Ethan mused, as the sleigh dropped down ahead of him over the dip of the school-house hill. He worked like ten at the unloading, and when it was over hastened on to Michael Eady’s for the glue. Eady and his assistant were both ‘down street’, and young Denis, who seldom deigned to take their place, was lounging by the stove with a knot of the golden youth of Starkfield. They hailed Ethan with ironic compliment and offers of conviviality; but no one knew where to find the glue. Ethan, consumed with the longing for a last moment alone with Mattie, hung about impatiently while Denis made an ineffectual search in the obscurer corners of the store.

‘Looks as if we were all sold out. But if you’ll wait around till the old man comes along maybe he can put his hand on it.’

‘I’m obliged to you, but I’ll try if I can get it down at Mrs Homan’s,’ Ethan answered, burning to be gone.

Denis’s commercial instinct compelled him to aver on oath that what Eady’s store could nor produce would never be found at the widow Homan’s; but Ethan, heedless of this boast, had already climbed to the sledge and was driving on to the rival establishment. Here, after considerable search, and sympathetic questions as to what he wanted it for, and whether ordinary flour paste wouldn’t do as well if she couldn’t find it, the widow Homan finally hunted down her solitary bottle of glue to its hiding-place in a medley of cough-lozenges and corset-laces.

‘I hope Zeena ain’t broken anything she sets store by,’ she called after him as he turned the greys toward home.

The fitful bursts of sleet had changed into a steady rain and the horses had heavy work even without a load behind them. Once or twice, hearing sleigh-bells, Ethan turned his head,
fancying that Zeena and Jotham might overtake him; but the old sorrel was not in sight, and he set his face against the rain and urged on his ponderous pair.

The barn was empty when the horses turned into it and, after giving them the most perfunctory ministrations they had ever received from him, he strode up to the house and pushed open the kitchen door.

Mattie was there alone, as he had pictured her. She was bending over a pan on the stove; but at the sound of his step she turned with a start and sprang to him.

‘See, here, Matt, I’ve got some stuff to mend the dish with! Let me get at it quick,’ he cried, waving the bottle in one hand while he put her lightly aside; but she did not seem to hear him.

‘Oh, Ethan – Zeena’s come,’ she said in a whisper, clutching his sleeve.

They stood and stared at each other, pale as culprits.

‘But the sorrel’s not in the barn!’ Ethan stammered.

‘Jotham Powell brought some goods over from the Flats for his wife, and he drove right on home with them,’ she explained.

He gazed blankly about the kitchen, which looked cold and squalid in the rainy winter twilight.

‘How is she?’ he asked, dropping his voice to Mattie’s whisper.

She looked away from him uncertainly. ‘I don’t know. She went right up to her room.’

‘She didn’t say anything?’

‘No.’

Ethan let out his doubts in a low whistle and thrust the bottle back into his pocket. ‘Don’t fret; I’ll come down and mend it in the night,’ he said. He pulled on his wet coat again and went back to the barn to feed the greys.

While he was there Jotham Powell drove up with the sleigh, and when the horses had been attended to Ethan said to him: ‘You might as well come back up for a bite.’ He was not sorry to assure himself of Jotham’s neutralizing presence at the supper table, for Zeena was always ‘nervous’ after a journey.
But the hired man, though seldom loth to accept a meal not included in his wages, opened his stiff jaws to answer slowly: ‘I’m obliged to you, but I guess I’ll go along back.’

Ethan looked at him in surprise. ‘Better come up and dry off. Looks as if there’d be something hot for supper.’

Jotham’s facial muscles were unmoved by this appeal and, his vocabulary being limited, he merely repeated: ‘I guess I’ll go along back.’

To Ethan there was something vaguely ominous in this stolid rejection of free food and warmth, and he wondered what had happened on the drive to nerve Jotham to such stoicism. Perhaps Zeena had failed to see the new doctor or had not liked his counsels: Ethan knew that in such cases the first person she met was likely to be held responsible for her grievance.

When he re-entered the kitchen the lamp lit up the same scene of shining comfort as on the previous evening. The table had been as carefully laid, a clear fire glowed in the stove, the cat dozed in its warmth, and Mattie came forward carrying a plate of dough-nuts.

She and Ethan looked at each other in silence; then she said, as she had said the night before: ‘I guess it’s about time for supper.’

E
than went out into the passage to hang up his wet garments. He listened for Zeena’s step and, not hearing it, called her name up the stairs. She did not answer, and after a moment’s hesitation he went up and opened her door. The room was almost dark, but in the obscurity he saw her sitting by the window, bolt upright, and knew by the rigidity of the outline projected against the pane that she had not taken off her travelling dress.

‘Well, Zeena,’ he ventured from the threshold.

She did not move, and he continued: ‘Supper’s about ready. Ain’t you coming?’

She replied: ‘I don’t feel as if I could touch a morsel.’ It was the consecrated formula, and he expected it to be followed, as usual, by her rising and going down to supper. But she remained seated, and he could think of nothing more felicitous than: ‘I presume you’re tired after the long ride.’

Turning her head at this, she answered solemnly: ‘I’m a great deal sicker than you think.’

Her words fell on his ear with a strange shock of wonder. He had often heard her pronounce them before – what if at last they were true?

He advanced a step or two into the dim room. ‘I hope that’s not so, Zeena,’ he said.

She continued to gaze at him through the twilight with a mien of wan authority, as of one consciously singled out for a great fate. ‘I’ve got complications,’ she said.

Ethan knew the word for one of exceptional import. Almost everybody in the neighbourhood had ‘troubles’, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had ‘complications’. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death-warrant. People struggled on
for years with ‘troubles’, but they almost always succumbed to ‘complications’.

Ethan’s heart was jerking to and fro between two extremities of feeling, but for the moment compassion prevailed. His wife looked so hard and lonely, sitting there in the darkness with such thoughts.

‘Is that what the new doctor told you?’ he asked, instinctively lowering his voice.

‘Yes. He says any regular doctor would want me to have an operation.’

Ethan was aware that, in regard to the important question of surgical intervention, the female opinion of the neighbourhood was divided, some glorying in the prestige conferred by operations while others shunned them as indelicate. Ethan, from motives of economy, had always been glad that Zeena was of the latter faction.

In the agitation caused by the gravity of her announcement he sought a consolatory short cut. ‘What do you know about this doctor anyway? Nobody ever told you that before.’

He saw his blunder before she could take it up: she wanted sympathy, not consolation.

‘I didn’t need to have anybody tell me I was losing ground every day. Everybody but you could see it. And everybody in Bettsbridge knows about Dr Buck. He has his office in Worcester, and comes over once a fortnight to Shadd’s Falls and Bettsbridge for consultations. Eliza Spears was wasting away with kidney trouble before she went to him, and now she’s up and around, and singing in the choir.’

‘Well, I’m glad of that. You must do just what he tells you,’ Ethan answered sympathetically.

She was still looking at him. ‘I mean to,’ she said. He was struck by a new note in her voice. It was neither whining nor reproachful, but drily resolute.

‘What does he want you should do?’ he asked, with a mounting vision of fresh expenses.

‘He wants I should have a hired girl. He says I oughtn’t to have to do a single thing around the house.’

‘A hired girl?’ Ethan stood transfixed.

‘Yes. And Aunt Martha found me one right off. Everybody said I was lucky to get a girl to come away out here, and I agreed to give her a dollar extry to make sure. She’ll be over to-morrow afternoon.’

Wrath and dismay contended in Ethan. He had foreseen an immediate demand for money, but not a permanent drain on his scant resources. He no longer believed what Zeena had told him of the supposed seriousness of her state: he saw in her expedition to Bettsbridge only a plot hatched between herself and her Pierce relations to foist on him the cost of a servant; and for the moment wrath predominated.

‘If you meant to engage a girl you ought to have told me before you started,’ he said.

‘How could I tell you before I started? How did I know what Dr Buck would say?’

‘Oh, Dr Buck –’ Ethan’s incredulity escaped in a short laugh. ‘Did Dr Buck tell you how I was to pay her wages?’

Her voice rose furiously with his. ‘No, he didn’t. For I’d ’a’ been ashamed to tell
him
that you grudged me the money to get back my health, when I lost it nursing your own mother!’

‘
You
lost your health nursing mother?’

‘Yes; and my folks all told me at the time you couldn’t do no less than marry me after—’

‘Zeena!’

Through the obscurity which hid their faces their thoughts seemed to dart at each other like serpents shooting venom. Ethan was seized with horror of the scene and shame at his own share in it. It was as senseless and savage as a physical fight between two enemies in the darkness.

He turned to the shelf above the chimney, groped for matches and lit the one candle in the room. At first its weak flame made no impression on the shadows; then Zeena’s face stood grimly out against the uncurtained pane, which had turned from grey to black.

It was the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together, and Ethan felt as if he had lost
an irretrievable advantage in descending to the level of recrimination. But the practical problem was there and had to be dealt with.

‘You know I haven’t got the money to pay for a girl, Zeena. You’ll have to send her back: I can’t do it.’

‘The doctor says it’ll be my death if I go on slaving the way I’ve had to. He doesn’t understand how I’ve stood it as long as I have.’

‘Slaving! –’ He checked himself again, ‘You sha’n’t lift a hand, if he says so. I’ll do everything round the house myself—’

She broke in: ‘You’re neglecting the farm enough already,’ and this being true, he found no answer, and left her time to add ironically: ‘Better send me over to the almshouse and done with it … I guess there’s been Fromes there afore now.’

The taunt burned into him, but he let it pass. ‘I haven’t got the money. That settles it.’

There was a moment’s pause in the struggle, as though the combatants were testing their weapons. Then Zeena said in a level voice: ‘I thought you were to get fifty dollars from Andrew Hale for that lumber.’

‘Andrew Hale never pays under three months.’ He had hardly spoken when he remembered the excuse he had made for not accompanying his wife to the station the day before; and the blood rose to his frowning brows.