Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels: A Library of America eBook Classic

by Katherine Anne Porter

  Mrs. Thompson was stirring up a big bowl of buttermilk cornbread. “You smell like a toper, Mr. Thompson,” she said with perfect dignity. “I wish you’d get one of the little boys to bring me in an extra load of firewood. I’m thinking about baking a batch of cookies tomorrow.”

  Mr. Thompson, all at once smelling the liquor on his own breath, sneaked out, justly rebuked, and brought in the firewood himself. Arthur and Herbert, grubby from thatched head to toes, from skin to shirt, came stamping in yelling for supper. “Go wash your faces and comb your hair,” said Mrs. Thompson, automatically. They retired to the porch. Each one put his hand under the pump and wet his forelock, combed it down with his fingers, and returned at once to the kitchen, where all the fair prospects of life were centered. Mrs. Thompson set an extra plate and commanded Arthur, the eldest, eight years old, to call Mr. Helton for supper.

  Arthur, without moving from the spot, bawled like a bull calf, “Saaaaaay, Hellllllton, suuuuuupper’s ready!” and added in a lower voice, “You big Swede!”

  “Listen to me,” said Mrs. Thompson, “that’s no way to act. Now you go out there and ask him decent, or I’ll get your daddy to give you a good licking.”

  Mr. Helton loomed, long and gloomy, in the doorway. “Sit right there,” boomed Mr. Thompson, waving his arm. Mr. Helton swung his square shoes across the kitchen in two steps, slumped onto the bench and sat. Mr. Thompson occupied his chair at the head of the table, the two boys scrambled into place opposite Mr. Helton, and Mrs. Thompson sat at the end nearest the stove. Mrs. Thompson clasped her hands, bowed her head and said aloud hastily, “Lord, for all these and Thy other blessings we thank Thee in Jesus’ name, amen,” trying to finish before Herbert’s rusty little paw reached the nearest dish. Otherwise she would be duty-bound to send him way from the table, and growing children need their meals. Mr. Thompson and Arthur always waited, but Herbert, aged six, was too young to take training yet.

  Mr. and Mrs. Thompson tried to engage Mr. Helton in conversation, but it was a failure. They tried first the weather, and then the crops, and then the cows, but Mr. Helton simply did not reply. Mr. Thompson then told something funny he had seen in town. It was about some of the other old grangers at the hotel, friends of his, giving beer to a goat, and the goat’s subsequent behavior. Mr. Helton did not seem to hear. Mrs. Thompson laughed dutifully, but she didn’t think it was very funny. She had heard it often before, though Mr. Thompson, each time he told it, pretended it had happened that self-same day. It must have happened years ago if it ever happened at all, and it had never been a story that Mrs. Thompson thought suitable for mixed company. The whole thing came of Mr. Thompson’s weakness for a dram too much now and then, though he voted for local option at every election. She passed the food to Mr. Helton, who took a helping of everything, but not much, not enough to keep him up to his full powers if he expected to go on working the way he had started.

  At last, he took a fair-sized piece of cornbread, wiped his plate up as clean as if it had been licked by a hound dog, stuffed his mouth full, and, still chewing, slid off the bench and started for the door.

  “Good night, Mr. Helton,” said Mrs. Thompson, and the other Thompsons took it up in a scattered chorus. “Good night, Mr. Helton!”

  “Good night,” said Mr. Helton’s wavering voice grudgingly from the darkness.

  “Gude not,” said Arthur, imitating Mr. Helton.

  “Gude not,” said Herbert, the copy-cat.

  “You don’t do it right,” said Arthur. “Now listen to me. Guuuuuude naht,” and he ran a hollow scale in a luxury of successful impersonation. Herbert almost went into a fit with joy.

  “Now you stop that,” said Mrs. Thompson. “He can’t help the way he talks. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, both of you, making fun of a poor stranger like that. How’d you like to be a stranger in a strange land?”

  “I’d like it,” said Arthur. “I think it would be fun.”

  “They’re both regular heathens, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson. “Just plain ignoramuses.” He turned the face of awful fatherhood upon his young. “You’re both going to get sent to school next year, and that’ll knock some sense into you.”

  “I’m going to git sent to the ’formatory when I’m old enough,” piped up Herbert. “That’s where I’m goin’.”

  “Oh, you are, are you?” asked Mr. Thompson. “Who says so?”

  “The Sunday School Supintendant,” said Herbert, a bright boy showing off.

  “You see?” said Mr. Thompson, staring at his wife. “What did I tell you?” He became a hurricane of wrath. “Get to bed, you two,” he roared until his Adam’s apple shuddered. “Get now before I take the hide off you!” They got, and shortly from their attic bedroom the sounds of scuffling and snorting and giggling and growling filled the house and shook the kitchen ceiling.

  Mrs. Thompson held her head and said in a small uncertain voice, “It’s no use picking on them when they’re so young and tender. I can’t stand it.”

  “My goodness, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, “we’ve got to raise ’em. We can’t just let ’em grow up hog wild.”

  She went on in another tone. “That Mr. Helton seems all right, even if he can’t be made to talk. Wonder how he comes to be so far from home.”

  “Like I said, he isn’t no whamper-jaw,” said Mr. Thompson, “but he sure knows how to lay out the work. I guess that’s the main thing around here. Country’s full of fellers trampin’ round looking for work.”

  Mrs. Thompson was gathering up the dishes. She now gathered up Mr. Thompson’s plate from under his chin. “To tell you the honest truth,” she remarked, “I think it’s a mighty good change to have a man round the place who knows how to work and keep his mouth shut. Means he’ll keep out of our business. Not that we’ve got anything to hide, but it’s convenient.”

  “That’s a fact,” said Mr. Thompson. “Haw, haw,” he shouted suddenly. “Means you can do all the talking, huh?”

  “The only thing,” went on Mrs. Thompson, “is this: he don’t eat hearty enough to suit me. I like to see a man set down and relish a good meal. My granma used to say it was no use putting dependence on a man who won’t set down and make out his dinner. I hope it won’t be that way this time.”

  “Tell you the truth, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, picking his teeth with a fork and leaning back in the best of good humors, “I always thought your granma was a ter’ble ole fool. She’d just say the first thing that popped into her head and call it God’s wisdom.”

  “My granma wasn’t anybody’s fool. Nine times out of ten she knew what she was talking about. I always say, the first thing you think is the best thing you can say.”

  “Well,” said Mr. Thompson, going into another shout, “you’re so reefined about that goat story, you just try speaking out in mixed comp’ny sometime! You just try it. S’pose you happened to be thinking about a hen and a rooster, hey? I reckon you’d shock the Babtist preacher!” He gave her a good pinch on her thin little rump. “No more meat on you than a rabbit,” he said, fondly. “Now I like ’em cornfed.”

  Mrs. Thompson looked at him open-eyed and blushed. She could see better by lamplight. “Why, Mr. Thompson, sometimes I think you’re the evilest-minded man that ever lived.” She took a handful of hair on the crown of his head and gave it a good, slow pull. “That’s to show you how it feels, pinching so hard when you’re supposed to be playing,” she said, gently.

  In spite of his situation in life, Mr. Thompson had never been able to outgrow his deep conviction that running a dairy and chasing after chickens was woman’s work. He was fond of saying that he could plow a furrow, cut sorghum, shuck corn, handle a team, build a corn crib, as well as any man. Buying and selling, too, were man’s work. Twice a week he drove the spring wagon to market with the fresh butter, a few eggs, fruits in their proper season, sold them, pocketed the change, and spent it as seemed best, being careful not to dig into Mrs. Thompson’s pin money.

  But from the fi
rst the cows worried him, coming up regularly twice a day to be milked, standing there reproaching him with their smug female faces. Calves worried him, fighting the rope and strangling themselves until their eyes bulged, trying to get at the teat. Wrestling with a calf unmanned him, like having to change a baby’s diaper. Milk worried him, coming bitter sometimes, drying up, turning sour. Hens worried him, cackling, clucking, hatching out when you least expected it and leading their broods into the barnyard where the horses could step on them; dying of roup and wryneck and getting plagues of chicken lice; laying eggs all over God’s creation so that half of them were spoiled before a man could find them, in spite of a rack of nests Mrs. Thompson had set out for them in the feed room. Hens were a blasted nuisance.

  Slopping hogs was hired man’s work, in Mr. Thompson’s opinion. Killing hogs was a job for the boss, but scraping them and cutting them up was for the hired man again; and again woman’s proper work was dressing meat, smoking, pickling, and making lard and sausage. All his carefully limited fields of activity were related somehow to Mr. Thompson’s feeling for the appearance of things, his own appearance in the sight of God and man. “It don’t look right,” was his final reason for not doing anything he did not wish to do.

  It was his dignity and his reputation that he cared about, and there were only a few kinds of work manly enough for Mr. Thompson to undertake with his own hands. Mrs. Thompson, to whom so many forms of work would have been becoming, had simply gone down on him early. He saw, after a while, how short-sighted it had been of him to expect much from Mrs. Thompson; he had fallen in love with her delicate waist and lace-trimmed petticoats and big blue eyes, and, though all those charms had disappeared, she had in the meantime become Ellie to him, not at all the same person as Miss Ellen Bridges, popular Sunday School teacher in the Mountain City First Baptist Church, but his dear wife, Ellie, who was not strong. Deprived as he was, however, of the main support in life which a man might expect in marriage, he had almost without knowing it resigned himself to failure. Head erect, a prompt payer of taxes, yearly subscriber to the preacher’s salary, land owner and father of a family, employer, a hearty good fellow among men, Mr. Thompson knew, without putting it into words, that he had been going steadily down hill. God amighty, it did look like somebody around the place might take a rake in hand now and then and clear up the clutter around the barn and the kitchen steps. The wagon shed was so full of broken-down machinery and ragged harness and old wagon wheels and battered milk pails and rotting lumber you could hardly drive in there any more. Not a soul on the place would raise a hand to it, and as for him, he had all he could do with his regular work. He would sometimes in the slack season sit for hours worrying about it, squirting tobacco on the ragweeds growing in a thicket against the wood pile, wondering what a fellow could do, handicapped as he was. He looked forward to the boys growing up soon; he was going to put them through the mill just as his own father had done with him when he was a boy; they were going to learn how to take hold and run the place right. He wasn’t going to overdo it, but those two boys were going to earn their salt, or he’d know why. Great big lubbers sitting around whittling! Mr. Thompson sometimes grew quite enraged with them, when imagining their possible future, big lubbers sitting around whittling or thinking about fishing trips. Well, he’d put a stop to that, mighty damn quick.

  As the seasons passed, and Mr. Helton took hold more and more, Mr. Thompson began to relax in his mind a little. There seemed to be nothing the fellow couldn’t do, all in the day’s work and as a matter of course. He got up at five o’clock in the morning, boiled his own coffee and fried his own bacon and was out in the cow lot before Mr. Thompson had even begun to yawn, stretch, groan, roar and thump around looking for his jeans. He milked the cows, kept the milk house, and churned the butter; rounded the hens up and somehow persuaded them to lay in the nests, not under the house and behind the haystacks; he fed them regularly and they hatched out until you couldn’t set a foot down for them. Little by little the piles of trash around the barns and house disappeared. He carried buttermilk and corn to the hogs, and curried cockleburs out of the horses’ manes. He was gentle with the calves, if a little grim with the cows and hens; judging by his conduct, Mr. Helton had never heard of the difference between man’s and woman’s work on a farm.

  In the second year, he showed Mr. Thompson the picture of a cheese press in a mail order catalogue, and said, “This is a good thing. You buy this, I make cheese.” The press was bought and Mr. Helton did make cheese, and it was sold, along with the increased butter and the crates of eggs. Sometimes Mr. Thompson felt a little contemptuous of Mr. Helton’s ways. It did seem kind of picayune for a man to go around picking up half a dozen ears of corn that had fallen off the wagon on the way from the field, gathering up fallen fruit to feed to the pigs, storing up old nails and stray parts of machinery, spending good time stamping a fancy pattern on the butter before it went to market. Mr. Thompson, sitting up high on the spring-wagon seat, with the decorated butter in a five-gallon lard can wrapped in wet towsack, driving to town, chirruping to the horses and snapping the reins over their backs, sometimes thought that Mr. Helton was a pretty meeching sort of fellow; but he never gave way to these feelings, he knew a good thing when he had it. It was a fact the hogs were in better shape and sold for more money. It was a fact that Mr. Thompson stopped buying feed, Mr. Helton managed the crops so well. When beef- and hog-slaughtering time came, Mr. Helton knew how to save the scraps that Mr. Thompson had thrown away, and wasn’t above scraping guts and filling them with sausages that he made by his own methods. In all, Mr. Thompson had no grounds for complaint. In the third year, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages, though Mr. Helton had not asked for a raise. The fourth year, when Mr. Thompson was not only out of debt but had a little cash in the bank, he raised Mr. Helton’s wages again, two dollars and a half a month each time.

  “The man’s worth it, Ellie,” said Mr. Thompson, in a glow of self-justification for his extravagance. “He’s made this place pay, and I want him to know I appreciate it.”

  Mr. Helton’s silence, the pallor of his eyebrows and hair, his long, glum jaw and eyes that refused to see anything, even the work under his hands, had grown perfectly familiar to the Thompsons. At first, Mrs. Thompson complained a little. “It’s like sitting down at the table with a disembodied spirit,” she said. “You’d think he’d find something to say, sooner or later.”

  “Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “When he gets ready to talk, he’ll talk.”

  The years passed, and Mr. Helton never got ready to talk. After his work was finished for the day, he would come up from the barn or the milk house or the chicken house, swinging his lantern, his big shoes clumping like pony hoofs on the hard path. They, sitting in the kitchen in the winter, or on the back porch in summer, would hear him drag out his wooden chair, hear the creak of it tilted back, and then for a little while he would play his single tune on one or another of his harmonicas. The harmonicas were in different keys, some lower and sweeter than the others, but the same changeless tune went on, a strange tune, with sudden turns in it, night after night, and sometimes even in the afternoons when Mr. Helton sat down to catch his breath. At first the Thompsons liked it very much, and always stopped to listen. Later there came a time when they were fairly sick of it, and began to wish to each other that he would learn a new one. At last they did not hear it any more, it was as natural as the sound of the wind rising in the evenings, or the cows lowing, or their own voices.

  Mrs. Thompson pondered now and then over Mr. Helton’s soul. He didn’t seem to be a church-goer, and worked straight through Sunday as if it were any common day of the week. “I think we ought to invite him to go to hear Dr. Martin,” she told Mr. Thompson. “It isn’t very Christian of us not to ask him. He’s not a forward kind of man. He’d wait to be asked.”

  “Let him alone,” said Mr. Thompson. “The way I look at it, his religion is every man’s own business. Besides, he ain’t got
any Sunday clothes. He wouldn’t want to go to church in them jeans and jumpers of his. I don’t know what he does with his money. He certainly don’t spend it foolishly.”

  Still, once the notion got into her head, Mrs. Thompson could not rest until she invited Mr. Helton to go to church with the family next Sunday. He was pitching hay into neat little piles in the field back of the orchard. Mrs. Thompson put on smoked glasses and a sunbonnet and walked all the way down there to speak to him. He stopped and leaned on his pitchfork, listening, and for a moment Mrs. Thompson was almost frightened at his face. The pale eyes seemed to glare past her, the eyebrows frowned, the long jaw hardened. “I got work,” he said bluntly, and lifting his pitchfork he turned from her and began to toss the hay. Mrs. Thompson, her feelings hurt, walked back thinking that by now she should be used to Mr. Helton’s ways, but it did seem like a man, even a foreigner, could be just a little polite when you gave him a Christian invitation. “He’s not polite, that’s the only thing I’ve got against him,” she said to Mr. Thompson. “He just can’t seem to behave like other people. You’d think he had a grudge against the world,” she said, “I sometimes don’t know what to make of it.”

  In the second year something had happened that made Mrs. Thompson uneasy, the kind of thing she could not put into words, hardly into thoughts, and if she had tried to explain to Mr. Thompson it would have sounded worse than it was, or not bad enough. It was that kind of queer thing that seems to be giving a warning, and yet, nearly always nothing comes of it. It was on a hot, still spring day, and Mrs. Thompson had been down to the garden patch to pull some new carrots and green onions and string beans for dinner. As she worked, sunbonnet low over her eyes, putting each kind of vegetable in a pile by itself in her basket, she noticed how neatly Mr. Helton weeded, and how rich the soil was. He had spread it all over with manure from the barns, and worked it in, in the fall, and the vegetables were coming up fine and full. She walked back under the nubbly little fig trees where the unpruned branches leaned almost to the ground, and the thick leaves made a cool screen. Mrs. Thompson was always looking for shade to save her eyes. So she, looking idly about, saw through the screen a sight that struck her as very strange. If it had been a noisy spectacle, it would have been quite natural. It was the silence that struck her. Mr. Helton was shaking Arthur by the shoulders, ferociously, his face most terribly fixed and pale. Arthur’s head snapped back and forth and he had not stiffened in resistance, as he did when Mrs. Thompson tried to shake him. His eyes were rather frightened, but surprised, too, probably more surprised than anything else. Herbert stood by meekly, watching. Mr. Helton dropped Arthur, and seized Herbert, and shook him with the same methodical ferocity, the same face of hatred. Herbert’s mouth crumpled as if he would cry, but he made no sound. Mr. Helton let him go, turned and strode into the shack, and the little boys ran, as if for their lives, without a word. They disappeared around the corner to the front of the house.