Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (15 page)

Zeena stood beside the ruin of her treasure, stiffening into a stony image of resentment. ‘
You
got down my pickle-dish – what for?’

A bright flush flew to Mattie’s cheeks. ‘I wanted to make the supper-table pretty,’ she said.

‘You wanted to make the supper-table pretty; and you waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got, and wouldn’t never use it, not even when the minister come to dinner, or Aunt Martha Pierce come over from Bettsbridge –’ Zeena paused with a gasp, as if terrified by her own evocation of the sacrilege. ‘You’re a bad girl, Mattie Silver, and I always known it. It’s the way your father begun, and I was warned of it when I took you, and I tried to keep my things where you couldn’t get at ’em – and now you’ve took from me the one I cared for most of all –’ She broke off in a short spasm of sobs that passed and left her more than ever like a shape of stone.

‘If I’d ’a’ listened to folks, you’d ’a’ gone before now, and this wouldn’t ’a’ happened,’ she said; and gathering up the bits of broken glass she went out of the room as if she carried a dead body …

W
hen Ethan was called back to the farm by his father’s illness his mother gave him, for his own use, a small room behind the untenanted ‘best parlour’. Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid out his papers on a kitchen-table, hung on the rough plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a calendar with ‘Thoughts from the Poets’, and tried, with these meagre properties, to produce some likeness to the study of a ‘minister’ who had been kind to him and lent him books when he was at Worcester. He still took refuge there in summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he had had to give her his stove, and consequently the room was uninhabitable for several months of the year.

To this retreat he descended as soon as the house was quiet, and Zeena’s steady breathing from the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel to the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena’s departure he and Mattie had stood speechless, neither seeking to approach the other. Then the girl had returned to her task of clearing up the kitchen for the night and he had taken his lantern and gone on his usual round outside the house. The kitchen was empty when he came back to it; but his tobacco-pouch and pipe had been laid on the table, and under them was a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman’s catalogue, on which three words were written: ‘Don’t trouble, Ethan’.

Going into his cold dark ‘study’ he placed the lantern on the table and, stooping to its light, read the message again and again. It was the first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and the possession of the paper gave him a strange new sense of her nearness; yet it deepened his anguish by reminding him
that henceforth they would have no other way of communicating with each other. For the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only cold paper and dead words!

Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by one, to Zeena’s narrow-mindedness and ignorance. And what good had come of it? She was a hundred times bitterer and more discontented than when he had married her: the one pleasure left her was to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts of self-defence rose up in him against such waste …

He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and lay down on the box-sofa to think. Under his cheek he felt a hard object with strange protuberances. It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when they were engaged – the only piece of needlework he had ever seen her do. He flung it across the floor and propped his head against the wall …

He knew a case of a man over the mountain – a young fellow of about his own age – who had escaped from just such a life of misery by going West with the girl he cared for. His wife had divorced him, and he had married the girl and prospered. Ethan had seen the couple the summer before at Shadd’s Falls, where they had come to visit relatives. They had a little girl with fair curls, who wore a gold locket and was dressed like a princess. The deserted wife had not done badly either. Her husband had given her the farm and she had managed to sell it, and with that and the alimony she had started a lunch-room at Bettsbridge and bloomed into activity and importance. Ethan was fired by the thought. Why should he not leave with Mattie the next day, instead of letting her go alone? He would hide his valise under the seat of the sleigh, and Zeena would suspect nothing till she went upstairs for her afternoon nap and found a letter on the bed …

His impulses were still near the surface, and he sprang up, re-lit the lantern, and sat down at the table. He rummaged
in the drawer for a sheet of paper, found one, and began to write.

‘Zeena, I’ve done all I could for you, and I don’t see as it’s been any use. I don’t blame you, nor I don’t blame myself. Maybe both of us will do better separate. I’m going to try my luck West, and you can sell the farm and mill, and keep the money—’

His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless conditions of his lot. If he gave the farm and mill to Zeena what would be left him to start his own life with? Once in the West he was sure of picking up work – he would not have feared to try his chance alone. But with Mattie depending on him the case was different. And what of Zeena’s fate? Farm and mill were mortgaged to the limit of their value, and even if she found a purchaser – in itself an unlikely chance — it was doubtful if she could clear a thousand dollars on the sale. Meanwhile, how could she keep the farm going? It was only by incessant labour and personal supervision that Ethan drew a meagre living from his land, and his wife, even if she were in better health than she imagined, could never carry such a burden alone.

Well, she could go back to her people, then, and see what they would do for her. It was the fate she was forcing on Mattie — why not let her try it herself? By the time she had discovered his whereabouts, and brought suit for divorce, he would probably – wherever he was – be earning enough to pay her a sufficient alimony. And the alternative was to let Mattie go forth alone, with far less hope of ultimate provision …

He had scattered the contents of the table-drawer in his search for a sheet of paper, and as he took up his pen his eye fell on an old copy of the
Bettsbridge Eagle
. The advertising sheet was folded uppermost, and he read the seductive words: ‘Trips to the West: Reduced Rates’.

He drew the lantern nearer and eagerly scanned the fares; then the paper fell from his hand and he pushed aside his unfinished letter. A moment ago he had wondered what he and Mattie were to live on when they reached the West; now he
saw that he had not even the money to take her there. Borrowing was out of the question: six months before he had given his only security to raise funds for necessary repairs to the mill, and he knew that without security no one at Starkfield would lend him ten dollars. The inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders hand-cuffing a convict. There was no way out – none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.

He crept back heavily to the sofa, stretching himself out with limbs so leaden that he felt as if they would never move again. Tears rose in his throat and slowly burned their way to his lids.

As he lay there, the window-pane that faced him, growing gradually lighter, inlaid upon the darkness a square of moon-suffused sky. A crooked tree-branch crossed it, a branch of the apple-tree under which, on summer evenings, he had sometimes found Mattie sitting when he came up from the mill. Slowly the rim of the rainy vapours caught fire and burnt away, and a pure moon swung into the blue. Ethan, rising on his elbow, watched the landscape whiten and shape itself under the sculpture of the moon. This was the night on which he was to have taken Mattie coasting, and there hung the lamp to light them! He looked out at the slopes bathed in lustre, the silver-edged darkness of the woods, the spectral purple of the hills against the sky, and it seemed as though all the beauty of the night had been poured out to mock his wretchedness …

He fell asleep, and when he woke the chill of the winter dawn was in the room. He felt cold and stiff and hungry, and ashamed of being hungry. He rubbed his eyes and went to the window. A red sun stood over the grey rim of the fields, behind trees that looked black and brittle. He said to himself: ‘This is Matt’s last day,’ and tried to think what the place would be without her.

As he stood there he heard a step behind him and she entered.

‘Oh, Ethan – were you here all night?’

She looked so small and pinched, in her poor dress, with
the red scarf wound about her, and the cold light turning her paleness sallow, that Ethan stood before her without speaking.

‘You must be frozen,’ she went on, fixing lustreless eyes on him.

He drew a step nearer. ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Because I heard you go down stairs again after I went to bed, and I listened all night, and you didn’t come up.’

All his tenderness rushed to his lips. He looked at her and said: ‘I’ll come right along and make up the kitchen fire.’

They went back to the kitchen, and he fetched the coal and kindlings and cleared out the stove for her, while she brought in the milk and the cold remains of the meat-pie. When warmth began to radiate from the stove, and the first ray of sunlight lay on the kitchen floor, Ethan’s dark thoughts melted in the mellower air. The sight of Mattie going about her work as he had seen her on so many mornings made it seem impossible that she should ever cease to be a part of the scene. He said to himself that he had doubtless exaggerated the significance of Zeena’s threats, and that she too, with the return of daylight, would come to a saner mood.

He went up to Mattie as she bent above the stove, and laid his hand on her arm. ‘I don’t want you should trouble either,’ he said, looking down into her eyes with a smile.

She flushed up warmly and whispered back: ‘No, Ethan, I ain’t going to trouble.’

‘I guess things’ll straighten out,’ he added.

There was no answer but a quick throb of her lids, and he went on: ‘She ain’t said anything this morning?’

‘No. I haven’t seen her yet.’

‘Don’t you take any notice when you do.’

With this injunction he left her and went out to the cow-barn. He saw Jotham Powell walking up the hill through the morning mist, and the familiar sight added to his growing conviction of security.

As the two men were clearing out the stalls Jotham rested on his pitch-fork to say: ‘Dan’l Byrne’s goin’ over to the Flats
to-day noon, an’ he c’d take Mattie’s trunk along, and make it easier ridin’ when I take her over in the sleigh.’

Ethan looked at him blankly, and he continued: ‘Mis’ Frome said the new girl’d be at the Flats at five, and I was to take Mattie then, so’s ’t she could ketch the six o’clock train for Stamford.’

Ethan felt the blood drumming in his temples. He had to wait a moment before he could find voice to say: ‘Oh, it ain’t so sure about Mattie’s going—’

‘That so?’ said Jotham indifferently; and they went on with their work.

When they returned to the kitchen the two women were already at breakfast. Zeena had an air of unusual alertness and activity. She drank two cups of coffee and fed the cat with the scraps left in the pie-dish; then she rose from her seat and, walking over to the window, snipped two or three yellow leaves from the geraniums. ‘Aunt Martha’s ain’t got a faded leaf on ’em; but they pine away when they ain’t cared for,’ she said reflectively. Then she turned to Jotham and asked: ‘What time’d you say Dan’l Byrne’d be along?’

The hired man threw a hesitating glance at Ethan. ‘Round about noon,’ he said.

Zeena turned to Mattie. ‘That trunk of yours is too heavy for the sleigh, and Dan’l Byrne’ll be round to take it over to the Flats,’ she said.

‘I’m much obliged to you, Zeena,’ said Mattie.

‘I’d like to go over things with you first,’ Zeena continued in an unperturbed voice. ‘I know there’s a huckaback towel missing; and I can’t make out what you done with that match-safe ’t used to stand behind the stuffed owl in the parlour.’

She went out, followed by Mattie, and when the men were alone Jotham said to his employer: ‘I guess I better let Dan’l come round, then.’

Ethan finished his usual morning tasks about the house and barn; then he said to Jotham: ‘I’m going down to Starkfield. Tell them not to wait dinner.’

The passion of rebellion had broken out in him again. That which had seemed incredible in the sober light of day had really come to pass, and he was to assist as a helpless spectator at Mattie’s banishment. His manhood was humbled by the part he was compelled to play and by the thought of what Mattie must think of him. Confused impulses struggled in him as he strode along to the village. He had made up his mind to do something, but he did not know what it would be.

The early mist had vanished and the fields lay like a silver shield under the sun. It was one of the days when the glitter of winter shines through a pale haze of spring. Every yard of the road was alive with Mattie’s presence, and there was hardly a branch against the sky or a tangle of brambles on the bank in which some bright shred of memory was not caught. Once, in the stillness, the call of a bird in a mountain ash was so like her laughter that his heart tightened and then grew large; and all these things made him see that something must be done at once.

Suddenly it occurred to him that Andrew Hale, who was a kind-hearted man, might be induced to reconsider his refusal and advance a small sum on the lumber if he were told that Zeena’s ill-health made it necessary to hire a servant. Hale, after all, knew enough of Ethan’s situation to make it possible for the latter to renew his appeal without too much loss of pride; and, moreover, how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?