Now in November (6 page)

There were other things, though, more in the mind than these which the coming of Grant had brought, and sometimes even the scratch of Kerrin's return was forgotten in the sight of green elms and the ghost-green of new sycamore leaves. The poplar catkins opened down from the top branches first, and looked like red squirrel-tails swinging. The top sheaths fell while the lower branches were still in bud, and their wax-yellow beaks lay on the grass. I wished we could live on the sight of these things (it would be a lot cheaper, Merle said), but they were only a part and could not satisfy everyone. Most people have the blindness of new-born things—a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known. But to Merle and me, even when we had first come, it seemed that our hearts must be small and shriveled-up things since they felt so tight and full with only an eye's breadth of loveliness to hold, and we wondered if they would grow or burst by the year's end, what with having to hold all the nights and days and
seasons, the change from hour to hour, and the change from minute to minute even, from cloud-shadows moving up and down the hills.

In those early years, to read and to eat and to be alive on the hills had been enough for Merle and me.
From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones. We called them the Gemini, and their inner branches grew short and were locked together so that the shape of both made only one tree with two boles.

At no hour did life suddenly change, nor was there any moment which could be said to have altogether made or altered us. We were the slow accretion of the days, built up, like the coral islands, of innumerable things.—The moment of evening air between the stove and the well outside . . . the sound of wind wrenching and whining in the sashes . . . the flesh of corn-kernels . . . fear—fear of the lantern's shadow . . . fear of the mortgage . . . cold milk and the sour red beets . . . the green beans and the corn bread crumbling in our mouths . . . fear again . . . and the voice of Kerrin singing to herself in the calf
lot . . . the sense of safety in Mother's nearness . . . the calm faith that was in her and came out of her like a warmth around . . . the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself. . . . We were added to by the shadow of leaves, and by the leaf itself . . . by the blue undulations across the snow, and the kingfisher's rattling scream even when creeks were frozen over.
We were the green peas, hard and swollen, which Merle gathered late so that what was earth in the morning would be gone into and swelling out the peas by night, making them bigger all through no trouble or expense of ours, which seemed an odd, almost too kind thing—like a miracle when none was asked. They were as much part of us as the sight of white-boned sycamores flung up against the sky, or clouds driven like steam along the tops. In the thought and the strangeness of self we could spend hours as traveling through a labyrinth, and it was a riddle sufficient in those days to keep the mind quick and seeking, hungry and never fed; and in the mystery of the turnip, you forgot the turnip-leaf.

But for Kerrin these things had never been satisfying
enough, even in other years. She used to get restless and savage, and rode out long ways into the night while we sat reading. “Where's Kerrin?” Father would keep on asking, would read a chapter and go peer out into the moonlight. “Why don't you keep her home, Willa?” he'd say to Mother. “How do you know what she's doing out this way? No girl ought to be out at night this way!” He'd be tired by dark, wanting to sleep early, wanted to go to bed by eight sometimes but insisted on staying up till Kerrin came back along the road, sometimes as late as nine or ten. We'd hear the plough-horses whinny and go thundering down the fence, and then the sorrel's feet rattle the road stones a fourth of a mile away, and hear his shrill, exhausted neighing. “She's here now,” Mother would say. “She's safe enough. You go to sleep now, Arnold.” And with the nearer rattling of stones and feet, Father would close his book, for a half-hour now unread, and go upstairs, having learned that he could not meet or say anything to her, and remembering the one night when she first had stayed this late and he had gone storming out to meet her, shouting for explanations he never got, and made inarticulate with rage when she would not answer or come into the house. She
had spent the night out in the barn that time, sleeping up in the weedy hay and more comfortable perhaps than we were, sick and unsleeping in our beds.

I remember the morning after that night.—It was April, and cold, walled in with mists high as the sheep-barn roof. We saw Kerrin come out of the barn with dry scraps of weed still stuck in her hair, and stretch and yawn in the sun that came down through the mists, then come up the stones to the kitchen when Dad had gone. We looked at each other and shivered, but thought it was because of the fog that clung to our clothes and made them damp and chilly. We came down into the kitchen and flapped their dampness in front of the fire, and Kerrin sat at the table without saying anything, and the hay still messed in her hair. Her legs were wet and goose-fleshed from walking up in the grass. She watched us to see what we would say, but we only went on drying our clothes, more interested in the thick bacon smell and the glunk of oatmeal on the stove. Mother brought her some bacon and a hunk of toast and milk that had cream still marbled on the top, and told her she'd better move up against the stove to dry; and we could see she was hoping that Father would stay out a good long time. Kerrin
ate savage and hugely like a wolf, and smeared on jelly till all her toast was gone, then ate the jelly plain in high, quivering spoonsful from the jar. Merle and I sat there and ate patiently at our blobs of oatmeal with milk around the edges. It came to me as a sort of dim, unfinished thought that there were hours of sun and hours of picking and hot hours on a stove all gone into those few minutes of Kerrin's swallowing and would become part of her, giving her energy to hate and use loud words and tears; and I wondered how Mother's faith would answer that, for it seemed to make the pattern of things more distorted than before. I hadn't time to follow this thought to the end—which was well, perhaps, for there was no answer, at least none that I could have found—for Father came in just then and stood in the doorway looking at us.

He was a big man and heavy, and his face hung dragged in long thin folds. His red hair used to be thick, but was now sparse and grown in somber hummocks. Once he had let it grow down over his collar, which made him look like a preacher and more kindly, but most of the time he was shaved and alien-looking to the earth. He had frosty eyes—a kind of white-blue with fierce pupils. I loved him sometimes when he
smiled; because he so seldom did, I guess. He cared most for Merle and me, partly because we loved the land more, which seemed to justify and comfort him in a way. Merle he loved most, and used to say that she
would have made a good boy. But he did not try to treat her as one, thinking that nothing could change a girl much. He looked at us from across the misty gulf that he thought was between him and all women, and thought of the place in which they moved around and did things as a long way off—
a place from which they might step across this gulf to marry a man, but any time might go back again. Only Mother he saw clearly. The outside part of her anyway. If she went back in secret to this woman-place he did not know it, because marriage was to her a thing of which mighty few men are worthy—a religion and long giving.

He seemed not to see or to have forgotten Kerrin, might not have noticed her at all if she'd kept still and combed her hair instead of leaving it strawed and weedy. “Max isn't coming up today,” he said. “He's sick.” He put the milk down slopping over the floor, and looked at Kerrin. He started to say something, but only got red and tight and turned around in a helpless, exasperated way. Mother asked him how
much they had finished yesterday, and he said it wasn't a third of what still was waiting. Max was slow, he muttered, and worked at home, besides—worked too much. . . . The Rathmans were planting corn, too. . . . Could silage it, anyhow, if it didn't sell. . . .

“Why don't you grow something that nobody else has got?” Kerrin blurted out. “Something that'll bring us more money than just corn!”

“You want too much too fast,” Father said. He was cold and quiet and sounded years away from her nagging voice. He spoke
as though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon.

I could see Mother watching him, screwed hard and tense, saying—be careful . . . be careful . . . don't look at her that way! . . . Not aloud, but with her eyes. She was praying inside, I knew. Aloud she said, in a sort of indifferent way, that he might try celery later on, that it was hard to raise, she knew, but none around here had it and it took more water than anyone else had the time or means to give.

“Who'll haul the water?” Dad asked. Less of a question than a sneer. He had the old look of tiredness on his face that came when we argued with him,
that look of being harried and forced to fight back against things not worth the battle. A look of woman-tiredness.

“I can do it,” Kerrin said. She looked excited and eager in a sudden flare. “Go ahead,” Father told her. “Go ahead and see what you can do!” He shoved back his chair and sat there laughing to himself. An unpleasant and meager sound, exasperated and turned in as if to some other man, invisible inside, who understood and pitied him. He seldom swore aloud, thought it was wrong to do before his girls;—but all the blasphemy was there, bursting and turning sour inside.

Merle and I sneaked away and went out of the house. The mists were all risen and we could see down into the valley where the peaches were coming into bloom and flecked with skinny rose. They were sparse that year and thin-petaled, but the wild plums flowered in clouds. There was a lane of them back behind the barns, and we went there past the fresh dung-heaps steaming warm and the tall hogs that rooted in the mud. The old sow Clytemnestra stared at us dully with suspicion and muttered, and with her were nine hairy shoats, following where her great dugs
trailed along the mud. The air came sweet and stale and full of a grassy smell. We felt that a hard, smothering weight was gone, and climbed the fence and started to run fast and blunderingly over the gopher field. We wanted to reach the woods and be hidden in it. Shut ourselves off in the sparse green shadows. The hollows were full of the wild thin pansies, blue as if frost or fog were laid there—acres, it seemed, and covering the ground thick as grass itself. We went up past the pond where already there were clusters of slimy eggs from the frogs and salamanders, transparent and round like a bunch of tapioca balls black-specked and stuck together. Merle picked up one in her hand but it slid away like a fat and slimy fish, and seemed almost to squirm. We waited and watched, but could find no frog swelled up to sing, and nothing that seemed alive but the whirling beetles that darted and left their streaks on water like the scratch of skates on ice. The white-oaks were in tassel then—but there is no way to tell of them. We only stood like a pair of stumps, and looked and thought that something would break inside, and we felt too stretched and heavy to hold much more. Then Merle went down on her knees in the grass and started to pull up the
pansies, almost savagely and in great chunks. “There're so many,” she said. “Nobody'ud miss them if I pulled a thousand!” And I pulled some, too, and it seemed to stop the hurt when you got your hands tight on them, even knowing that they would die. . . . We found a bat in the wild shadbushes, clung upside down like the body of some gigantic moth, and his gold-brown fur had a metal light. Glowed orange. We peered in the wild gooseberry bushes and saw the mayflies dance there like a dust of pollen, and under the crab-trees found the dead leaves move where something had burrowed a tunnel, but we could not see its face or know whether it might be mouse or mole. Then Merle said, “Look!” in a bursting whisper and pointed up at a black-oak, hollowed out with disease and carrying great swollen lumps of bark,—and I saw the cold stare of barred owl-faces. Young ones with stony eyes. I felt ready to burst with excitement, wanted to shout and yet was afraid to move: having hunted their nest since we first came, knowing it must be somewhere near and hearing the old ones call and hoot back and forth even in daylight and early evenings.

I thought I was full enough of happiness to last
for the rest of life, to cover forever after the things like that morning in the kitchen, the things that were warped and grew misshapen and made life seem like a nest of biting ants. And then it came to me as it did at times when the woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for, that maybe they wouldn't be always ours—that a drouth or a too-wet year or even a year over-good when everyone else had too much to sell—could snatch them away from us, and a scratch on a piece of paper could cancel a hundred acres and all our lives. And this same sick fear came up again like a sly and smothering hand.

“What's the matter?” Merle wanted to know; and I think she could see the thoughts as though written plain on my broad smooth face, because she stood there chewing a twig, and all the inside light was gone out of her own. Above the fog of redbud trees and the wild plum, and across the moving sun-shadows, the buzzards went drifting on huge wings or rose up reluctantly from the brush, their red necks raw and sore-looking. And there was this same thought tunneling in both our minds.

But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all
thoughts must travel in. And as we were sane then and normal as the smooth face of a plate, the fear and the forgetting of it were balanced one against the other, and we no more brooded on this than the young calves would. We saw that the shadows were small and dwarfed by noon, and we were suddenly hollow with a hunger that no fear could make us forget or any wild ginger satisfy; and Merle hoped there would be muffins—big ones with hard tops; and muffins were more important and more wanted than all the hills on earth.