Time Is Noon (26 page)

People were tired of them. They had grown tired of the same face in the pulpit, saying the same things, the same eternal things. They wanted something brighter and more amusing. She began thinking of them one by one. Which of them would stand by her father, which of them would not? But when she began thinking and remembering how they had last looked, how they had last spoken, she could not be sure of any of them, not even of Miss Kinney, who would be swayed by the last person she heard. There was Dr. Crabbe, Mr. Pegler, Mrs. Mark. But they were not the church, and Mrs. Mark had her legs. There was no one of whom she could be sure.

She entered the house and went quietly to her room. Then it came to her that there was no more shelter in this room, no more safety in this house. All that she had thought was safety forever about her was gone, unreasonably gone and not to be regained. This house in which they had all made a home belonged to their enemies. It belonged to the church. It could not be a home, this house given and taken away at the whim of a crowd. They had built a home under foreign shelter.

She stood by the window, staring across the wintry garden. All these flowers her mother had planted in foreign soil, the lemon lilies, the ferns they had dug from woods and streams. Her mother had wandered through woods in spring with a trowel and a basket, crying aloud over bloodroot and trillium and feathery mosses. Before she went, Joan thought savagely, she would dig them all up and throw them away. She would chop the roses at the roots and hack the lily bulbs. Who could help growing old? They were all growing old. They were old—old—the church was nothing but old people. Yet who turned Mr. Parker out of his house because he was old, and who took bread away from Mrs. Kinney because she was over eighty years old? Then she was suddenly afraid. What did people do when the roof was taken from over them and wage was stopped and there was no more bread? What would she do with this old man? She had no one.

But they helped her to be proud. On Sundays before their strangeness she could pretend she knew nothing. She could receive coldly their meaningless friendliness. She sat in the pew where once they had all sat to hear a proud priest, listening fiercely now to an old mumbling man.

For it was impossible not to see that he was now nothing but an old man. He mounted the pulpit steps wearily and he clutched the handrail when he descended. Only for a moment, that first moment when he faced his failing congregation, did he throw up his head and straighten his shoulders. Soon he forgot. Soon he was poring aloud over his manuscript, reading strange dreamy stuff to which the few listened, bewildered or scornful.

“And I dreamed I saw as though the heavens were rolled away, a fair land, through which flowed serene a river. The name of the river was Peace, and there was room for everyone there on its banks, the young and the old, and they lived together safely. Dreams are not meaningless, not vagrant. Dreams—”

“I must take him away,” she planned passionately. She wanted to run up now and lead him away and shelter him.

Yet he would not be sheltered. In the house when they were alone it was necessary to pretend with him that everything was well. He came home from a meeting of his vestry, stricken and bewildered, muttering replies to himself. Waiting for him, standing at the dining room window watching for him, she wept when she saw him dragging himself across the gray frost-bitten lawn. His lips were moving and he made angry, futile gestures that were like weak blows.

But when, anguished with tenderness, she ran to the door, he pushed her feebly away, panting a little. “Is—is supper ready?” he asked. “I feel—a little faint”

“Oh, what has happened?”

“Nothing—nothing,” he replied with unusual irritation. “I’m just a little tired. I’d like to have supper right away—as soon as I wash—”

He went slowly upstairs. Standing at the foot, she heard him moan softly at the top step. “O, God—” But after a moment he went on and he did not call her. She must, she perceived, allow him to remain what he had always been. He must remain a priest or he would die. But a little later, out of the absolute silence in which they sat at the table, she asked again, “Father—can’t you tell me? Couldn’t you talk it over with me?” He answered, “Women do not understand these things. There is nothing in which you could help me. I trust in God.” She smiled at him, pitifully, and let him be. At night, lying awake, she could hear praying, in long stretches of monotone. He was still putting his trust in God …

And if he gave up his trust in God he would have nothing left. People had drawn away and left him. One by one they had all gone. Mary was gone. She used to lie here in this bed and in the night when he awoke to a strange aching loneliness he could look over and see her dark head or put out his hand and touch her warm breathing body. Now his own feeble warmth could scarcely change in a whole night the chill of the sheets. And in the night they all seemed to mock him. The members of his spiritual family! In the night he even wondered if what they said was true. Perhaps he was getting old. But if he was too old to preach, what could he do? There was the little insurance he had all these years in the Ministers’ Relief Fund. Mary had made him take it when Joan was born. It had seemed not trusting in God, but she kept at him. And he could draw it out in another two years. It would all be his, then. He planned in the darkness that he might rent a little room in South End and go and preach to the unsaved. “And the common people heard him gladly.” “For so persecuted they the saints before you.” He began murmuring the strong resolute words and after a while they helped him. He began to feel the old arrogant determination to make his people do God’s will. No, he would not retreat before his people. The Lord had appointed him—the Lord alone could dismiss him. He would not speak to anyone. He put his trust in God. He slept fitfully before dawn …

But if he would not tell her, she must know otherwise how to take care of him. She went to Mr. Weeks, who was the church treasurer. She remembered Netta’s father as a poor man, a mechanic who had moved to the village from elsewhere and opened a small grocery store. Soon he was unaccountably prosperous, enough so to buy the shirt factory at South End, though he had not opened it yet. But they had never bought of him because her mother said they were used to Mr. Winters’ general store. She did not like Peter Weeks because he asked outright what Winters was selling for, and twisted his tight small mouth to say, “I’ll let you have it two cents under his price—anything you want.”

“No, thank you,” she replied coldly. When Mr. Weeks had joined the church and Hannah said, “Reckon we’d oughta buy a little of him now and then,” her mother had replied proudly, “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

She entered the grocery shop, her head high and her heart water within her.

Netta’s father hastened toward her. “Well, well,” he cried, but she would not answer his meager joviality. “Mr. Weeks,” she said directly over the counter, “I’ve come to ask one thing—when does my father have to go?”

“Well, now,” he considered, taken aback. His angular wizened colorless face fell into his conventional shopman’s smile. “You and Netta are old friends—I want to do all I can.”

“It’s not necessary,” she said steadily. “I’ll take care of my father.”

“The fact is,” Mr. Weeks said, moving a cud of tobacco in his cheek, “the old man’s kind of stubborn. Won’t give his resignation.”

“I see,” said Joan.

“We’re waiting for that. Can’t technically close him out before then. The fact is, we’d want to get a new man started as soon as we can, but I’m treasurer and I know we can’t afford any overlapping. Finances in bad shape, but I’m getting things in order—”

“I see,” said Joan. “Then the sooner we go the better.”

“He’d better hand in his resignation, you see, Joan.” He moved his quid. “I don’t want to be hard on him—you and Netta—Say, hear Netta’s going to splice up with Ned Parsons? She was a long time going off, Netta was, but she did well in the end. Ned takes after his pa, I’m glad to say, instead of his ma. He works steady. I’m thinking some of starting up the factory, and if I do I’m going to put Ned in charge—that is, if he goes ahead with Netta.”

“I’m very glad for Netta. Will you tell her? Good-bye.” She forgot Ned and Netta at once.

Across the table at supper when Hannah was gone she said, “Father, let’s do proudly what has to be done. We’ll go to the city—I’ll find a job. And Francis can help. We’ll start again.”

He had been eating rapidly and hungrily. Of late, with all the worry, he had let himself eat more. He often felt faint and he needed strength. Tonight the stew had been unusually good, and the steamed pudding. But Joan was so quick. He stared at her and put his hand to his mouth, and she saw he was sick. She ran to him, but he fended her off with his arm and rose and went out. When after a long time he did not call her, she went to find him. He was in his room and when she called he cried feebly that he was undressing and she could not come. She sat down on a little stool by the door and waited. But the door did not open, and at last she opened it softly. He lay on his back, his folded hands on his breast. His eyes were closed and he was drawing deep breaths, snoring now and then. He had crept into bed without calling her and gone to sleep. She closed the door and went to her own room. He did not want her.

For her there was no sleep. She could not sleep in such uncertainty, in such loneliness. Rose was far away and Francis had written only once. But she remembered Francis, how he had leaped from his bed and dashed for Dr. Crabbe that day. She went to her desk and began to write to Francis. “We must go. You see how it is,” she ended. “We had better come to New York and I could get a job. At any rate, we must get out of this house.”

She sat a while and added, “I have no one to count on but you. And he is your father, too.”

She sealed and stamped the letter and lay down in her bed, listening, to fall at last into sleep.

She woke with the feeling of a strange sound just heard. She had heard it in deep sleep and waked instantly from old habit with her mother. She lay awake, taut, listening. What was it? The house was very silent. The night was still. Then it came again, a loud choke, a snore, a voice struggling and stifled. She leaped out of bed and ran to the door between his room and hers. But he had locked it. Sometime, without her knowing it, he had locked it so that he might be quite alone. She cried through the panel, “Father—I’m coming—” But he did not answer. There was the door from the hall. She ran down the hall, calling upward to the attic for Hannah as she ran. This door was not locked, thank God! She pushed it open. The room was dark. There was no moon and even through the open window only darkness streamed.

But out of that darkness she heard his strange breathing. She fumbled for the light and heard on the stair Hannah’s stumbling and muttering against the darkness.

“Hannah!” she cried. “Go and get Dr. Crabbe. Something’s wrong with Father!”

Hannah’s voice grated through the darkness. “He’s overeaten. He’s always held back, but last night he kind of let go and ate. I noticed him on the pudding.” She reached the door as Joan found the switch. The light flashed down upon the bed, upon him. They stared at him in the instant together. He lay stiffly, his arms flung into a shape of agony. His mouth was twisted, across his jaws and pinned there; held by invisibly crooked muscles. His eyes were dim, half-open. His usually snow-pale face was strained with purple—

“My soul and body!” whispered Hannah. “It’s a stroke!” She turned and padded away …

This figure on the bed did not stir. She was afraid of him—so strange, so twisted. She lifted his hand to place it nearer his body in a more easy pose and the arm was stiff. She could not move it. A dribble of saliva ran from the loose corner of his mouth and she lifted the sheet and wiped it away, sickened. “Father, Father!” she cried. But he neither saw nor heard. He was absorbed in the heavy breath he drew.

And then, as she stood there alone with him, the breathing stopped. At one instant the breath came, deep and thick, roughened, grating, like something dragging harshly over a rocky road. Then it stopped. Even as she stood, crying to him, it stopped. She waited, in terror, for it to begin again. But the strange purple faded out of his face, gravity fell upon his crooked mouth, and the twisting left his flung limbs. The body seemed to relax, to curl, to shrink. The breath was finished. She turned away and ran—ran down the stairs, calling, “Hannah, Hannah!”

The front door opened and Dr. Crabbe was there, his overcoat over his striped pajamas, his hair a fringe of tangle about his baldness. “Father’s gone—he’s gone!” She shrieked at him as though she were a little girl. “Oh, Dr. Crabbe—oh, what shall I do!” She began suddenly to cry aloud.

He lumbered up the stairs, and she followed behind him, and Hannah behind her, a frenzied procession. She could not keep from sobbing, every breath arose a sob. She felt weak with sobbing. They were by him but he had not moved. There he lay, just as she had left him, Dr. Crabbe lifted his arm. It lay limp in his grasp and he put it down gently. Hannah began to sniffle. “It was a stroke, wasn’t it, Doctor? He always kept himself starved and last night he took three helpings of my dried fig pudding and the hard sauce. I was that surprised, beside all else he’d eaten—”

Dr. Crabbe did not answer her. He did not say to Joan, “Stop sobbing, child.” He looked down into the proud dead face, seeming not to hear her. It was a proud high face, even though dead. “The old son of God,” he murmured, smiling. “He stood up in the vestry last Sunday and told them God called him, not man, and that he would die before he resigned. He was lucky—not everybody can die when life is ended.” He bent and with gentleness he touched the eyelids and closed them and laid the hands upon the breast.

But she kept on sobbing. She could not stop her sobbing.

They were all very kind, of course. They sent a great many flowers. The house was full of flowers, and on the floral pieces were little notes speaking of his “wonderful service.” “So many years,” they all chorused. Now that he had, in a manner, resigned, they were eager to praise, to appreciate. Mr. Weeks came to see her and to say uncomfortably, “I didn’t mean any harm, you know. It was just business—things getting sorta rundown—if I’d had any idea—”