Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters (37 page)

He knelt down by the mattress, and pressed the lids over the dead woman’s eyes. Charity, trembling and sick, knelt beside him, and tried to compose her mother’s body. She drew the stocking over the dreadful glistening leg, and pulled the skirt down to the battered upturned boots. As she did so, she looked at her mother’s face, thin yet swollen, with lips parted in a frozen gasp above the broken teeth. There was no sign in it of anything human: she lay there like a dead dog in a ditch. Charity’s hands grew cold as they touched her.

Mr Miles drew the woman’s arms across her breast and laid his coat over her. Then he covered her face with his handkerchief, and placed the bottle with the candle in it at her head. Having done this he stood up.

‘Is there no coffin?’ he asked, turning to the group behind him.

There was a moment of bewildered silence; then the fierce girl spoke up. ‘You’d oughter brought it with you. Where’d we get one here, I’d like ter know?’

Mr Miles, looking at the others, repeated: ‘Is it possible you have no coffin ready?’

‘That’s what I say: them that has it sleeps better,’ an old woman murmured. ‘But then she never had no bed.…’

‘And the stove warn’t hers,’ said the lank-haired man, on the defensive.

Mr Miles turned away from them and moved a few steps apart. He had drawn a book from his pocket, and after a pause he opened it and began to read, holding the book at arm’s length and low down, so that the pages caught the feeble light. Charity had remained on her knees by the mattress: now that her mother’s face was covered it was easier to stay near her, and avoid the sight of the living faces which too horribly showed by what stages hers had lapsed into death.

‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ Mr Miles began; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.… Though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.…’

In my flesh shall I see God!
Charity thought of the gaping mouth and stony eyes under the handkerchief, and of the glistening leg over which she had drawn the stocking.…

‘We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of it—’

There was a sudden muttering and a scuffle at the back of the group. ‘I brought the stove,’ said the elderly man with lank hair, pushing his way between the others. ‘I wen’ down to Creston’n bought it … n’ I got a right to take it outer here … n’ I’ll lick any feller says I ain’t.…’

‘Sit down, damn you!’ shouted the tall youth who had been drowsing on the bench against the wall.

‘For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them.…’

‘Well, it
are
his,’ a woman in the background interjected in a frightened whine.

The tall youth staggered to his feet. ‘If you don’t hold your mouths I’ll turn you all out o’ here, the whole lot of you,’ he cried with many oaths. ‘G’wan, minister … don’t let ’em faze you.…’

‘Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first-fruits of them that slept.… Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.… For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruption shall have put on incorruption, and when this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory.…’

One by one the mighty words fell on Charity’s bowed head, soothing the horror, subduing the tumult, mastering her as they mastered the drink-dazed creatures at her back. Mr Miles read to the last word, and then closed the book.

‘Is the grave ready?’ he asked.

Liff Hyatt, who had come in while he was reading, nodded a ‘Yes’, and pushed forward to the side of the mattress. The young man on the bench, who seemed to assert some sort of right of kinship with the dead woman, got to his feet again, and the proprietor of the stove joined him. Between them they raised up the mattress; but their movements were unsteady, and the coat slipped to the floor, revealing the poor body in its helpless misery. Charity, picking up the coat, covered her mother once more. Liff had brought a lantern, and the old woman who had already spoken took it up, and opened the door to let the little procession pass out. The wind had dropped, and the night was very dark and bitterly cold. The old woman walked ahead, the lantern shaking in her hand and spreading out before her a pale patch of dead grass and coarse-leaved weeds enclosed in an immensity of blackness.

Mr Miles took Charity by the arm, and side by side they walked behind the mattress. At length the old woman with the lantern stopped, and Charity saw the light fall on the stooping shoulders of the bearers and on a ridge of upheaved earth over which they were bending. Mr Miles released her arm and approached the hollow on the other side of the ridge; and while the men stooped down, lowering the mattress into the grave, he began to speak again.

‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery.… He cometh up and is cut down … he fleeth as it were a shadow.… Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death …’

‘Easy there … is she down?’ piped the claimant to the stove; and the young man called over his shoulder: ‘Lift the light there, can’t you?’

There was a pause, during which the light floated uncertainly over the open grave. Someone bent over and pulled out Mr Miles’s coat — (‘No, no – leave the handkerchief,’ he interposed) – and then Liff Hyatt, coming forward with a spade, began to shovel in the earth.

‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear sister here departed, we therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’ Liff’s gaunt shoulders rose and bent in the lantern light as he dashed the clods of earth into the grave. ‘God – it’s froze a’ready,’ he muttered, spitting into his palm and passing his ragged shirt-sleeve across his perspiring face.

‘Through our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto His glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself …’ The last spadeful of earth fell on the vile body of Mary Hyatt, and Liff rested on his spade, his shoulder blades still heaving with the effort.

‘Lord, have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, Lord have mercy upon us.…’

Mr Miles took the lantern from the old woman’s hand and swept its light across the circle of bleared faces. ‘Now kneel down, all of you,’ he commanded, in a voice of authority that Charity had never heard. She knelt down at the edge of the grave, and the others, stiffly and hesitatingly, got to their knees beside her. Mr Miles knelt, too. ‘And now pray with me – you know this prayer,’ he said, and he began: ‘Our Father which art in Heaven …’ One or two of the women falteringly took
the words up, and when he ended, the lank-haired man flung himself on the neck of the tall youth. ‘It was this way,’ he said. ‘I tole her the night before, I says to her …’ The reminiscence ended in a sob.

Mr Miles had been getting into his coat again. He came up to Charity, who had remained passively kneeling by the rough mound of earth.

‘My child, you must come. It’s very late.’

She lifted her eyes to his face: he seemed to speak out of another world.

‘I ain’t coming: I’m going to stay here.’

‘Here? Where? What do you mean?’

‘These are my folks. I’m going to stay with them.’

Mr Miles lowered his voice. ‘But it’s not possible – you don’t know what you are doing. You can’t stay among these people: you must come with me.’

She shook her head and rose from her knees. The group about the grave had scattered in the darkness, but the old woman with the lantern stood waiting. Her mournful withered face was not unkind, and Charity went up to her.

‘Have you got a place where I can lie down for the night?’ she asked. Liff came up, leading the buggy out of the night. He looked from one to the other with his feeble smile. ‘She’s my mother. She’ll take you home,’ he said; and he added, raising his voice to speak to the old woman: ‘It’s the girl from lawyer Royall’s – Mary’s girl … you remember.…’

The woman nodded and raised her sad old eyes to Charity’s. When Mr Miles and Liff clambered into the buggy she went ahead with the lantern to show them the track they were to follow; then she turned back, and in silence she and Charity walked away together through the night.

C
harity lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother’s body had lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt’s earthly pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt’s mother slept on a blanket, with two children – her grandchildren, she said – rolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.

Through the small square of glass in the opposite wall Charity saw a deep funnel of sky, so black, so remote, so palpitating with frosty stars that her very soul seemed to be sucked up into it. Up there somewhere, she supposed, the God whom Mr Miles had invoked was waiting for Mary Hyatt to appear. What a long flight it was! And what would she have to say when she reached Him?

Charity’s bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to picture her mother’s past, and to relate it in any way to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it was impossible to imagine any link between them. She herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the height of the heavens had divided them. She had seen poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community where poor thrifty Mrs Hawes and the industrious Ally represented the nearest approach to destitution there was nothing to suggest the savage misery of the Mountain farmers.

As she lay there, half-stunned by her tragic initiation, Charity vainly tried to think herself into the life about her. But she could not even make out what relationship these people bore to each other, or to her dead mother; they seemed to be herded together in a sort of passive promiscuity in which
their common misery was the strongest link. She tried to picture to herself what her life would have been if she had grown up on the Mountain, running wild in rags, sleeping on the floor curled up against her mother, like the pale-faced children huddled against old Mrs Hyatt, and turning into a fierce bewildered creature like the girl who had apostrophized her in such strange words. She was frightened by the secret affinity she had felt with this girl, and by the light it threw on her own beginnings. Then she remembered what Mr Royall had said in telling her story to Lucius Harney: ‘Yes, there was a mother; but she was glad to have the child go. She’d have given her to anybody.…’

Well! after all, was her mother so much to blame? Charity, since that day, had always thought of her as destitute of all human feeling; now she seemed merely pitiful. What mother would not want to save her child from such a life? Charity thought of the future of her own child, and tears welled into her aching eyes, and ran down over her face. If she had been less exhausted, less burdened with his weight, she would have sprung up then and there and fled away.…

The grim hours of the night dragged themselves slowly by, and at last the sky paled and dawn threw a cold blue beam into the room. She lay in her corner staring at the dirty floor, the clothes-line hung with decaying rags, the old woman huddled against the cold stove, and the light gradually spreading across the wintry world, and bringing with it a new day in which she would have to live, to choose, to act, to make herself a place among these people – or to go back to the life she had left. A mortal lassitude weighed on her. There were moments when she felt that all she asked was to go on lying there unnoticed; then her mind revolted at the thought of becoming one of the miserable herd from which she sprang, and it seemed as though, to save her child from such a fate, she would find strength to travel any distance, and bear any burden life might put on her.

Vague thoughts of Nettleton flitted through her mind. She said to herself that she would find some quiet place where she
could bear her child, and give it to decent people to keep; and then she would go out like Julia Hawes and earn its living and hers. She knew that girls of that kind sometimes made enough to have their children nicely cared for; and every other consideration disappeared in the vision of her baby, cleaned and combed and rosy, and hidden away somewhere where she could run in and kiss it, and bring it pretty things to wear. Anything, anything was better than to add another life to the nest of misery on the Mountain.…

The old woman and the children were still sleeping when Charity rose from her mattress. Her body was stiff with cold and fatigue, and she moved slowly lest her heavy steps should rouse them. She was faint with hunger, and had nothing left in her satchel; but on the table she saw the half of a stale loaf. No doubt it was to serve as the breakfast of old Mrs Hyatt and the children; but Charity did not care; she had her own baby to think of. She broke off a piece of the bread and ate it greedily; then her glance fell on the thin faces of the sleeping children, and filled with compunction she rummaged in her satchel for something with which to pay for what she had taken. She found one of the pretty chemises that Ally had made for her, with a blue ribbon run through its edging. It was one of the dainty things on which she had squandered her savings, and as she looked at it the blood rushed to her forehead. She laid the chemise on the table, and stealing across the floor lifted the latch and went out.…

The morning was icy cold and a pale sun was just rising above the eastern shoulder of the Mountain. The houses scattered on the hillside lay cold and smokeless under the sun-flecked clouds, and not a human being was in sight. Charity paused on the threshold and tried to discover the road by which she had come the night before. Across the field surrounding Mrs Hyatt’s shanty she saw the tumble-down house in which she supposed the funeral service had taken place. The trail ran across the ground between the two houses and disappeared in the pine-wood on the flank of the Mountain; and a little way to the right, under a wind-beaten thorn, a
mound of fresh earth made a dark spot on the fawn-coloured stubble. Charity walked across the field to the mound. As she approached it she heard a bird’s note in the still air, and looking up she saw a brown song-sparrow perched in an upper branch of the thorn above the grave. She stood a minute listening to his small solitary song; then she rejoined the trail and began to mount the hill to the pine-wood.