‘I got in a dispute with old Reed over the pay and up and quit that place. That was when I was twenty. Next year looked like there wasn’t work enough at home for me and Pap both, and I left home and went over on the ridge for a spell. I got in a fight with Hank Beaver over a girl. She liked me best and was all set to marry but I couldn’t marry no girl yet and she took Hank after all, and I went off to work up around Mayses Creek, and there was a girl up there too. Then Mammy died, and then Pappy, and I went back home to get what little was a-comen to me after the stock was sold, but it was a little trifle. By that time I didn’t care so much about girls. Then I bought a monument stone for Mammy and Pappy. I recollect it took all that next year to pay off that.’
At the memory of his mother he remembered Ellen again and drew her closer, looking at her through the dim light or brushing his hand over her hair. The story waited long while he searched again for her beauty and approved her with his broken endearments and his caressing hands. After a long interval his voice spoke again in questioning. He had been in jail; did she know that he had been in jail? Could she like a man who had been in the dirty lock-up and would she draw away from his arms? ‘I got in a fight with Ofatt’s boy over a trifle – a grown man, he was, and his own master. I got in this-here fight with Dave Ofatt over some trifle, and Ofatt, the old man, made a remark to me in town one day, a remark I wouldn’t countenance and I hauled off and knocked him over right on the street of the town, and for that I got locked up overnight and tried next day in the court. On account of Ofatt being prominent, the Judge, he fined me twenty dollars and ten days in jail. I borrowed the money to pay the fine offen Tobe Baily and worked, after I got outen jail, for Litsey a spell, long enough to pay Tobe back, I recollect. It was then I got to feelen my strength and I got set up over my powers to lift and pull. Ne’er other man at the blacksmith shop could lift equal to me, not even old Nathan though he was a strong man in his arms and neck.’
He recounted tales of his power and his excellence at contests that were tried at the shop and his great strength in the harvest field, no other man quite his equal or mate, taking shock for shock at the cutting. His large hand closed and unclosed, feeling again its strength, and his arm muscles flexed in memory of their first hardy-brawn. Or he took up his story of wandering again, carelessly now, between interests in the pipe, lazily told between caresses.
‘Then up around Tick Creek I worked for a man named Pike. A good clever fellow, and I stayed there two year. An old man, he was, that knew a heap about signs and farmed by tokens. His wife was young, thirty I reckon, and we-all made a jolly set till I see she had a fancy to me. In fact she was set to me more’n I liked and even got me so I couldn’t seem to help, a big quick-eyed woman, a fine-looker. But I pulled loose and went off – good clever man, old Pike was, and I couldn’t see my way to do him no dirt, so I pulled outen the country. I learned a heap from him about tokens. Then next year, over on Master’s place, I went plumb a fool over a girl but she wouldn’t marry me after all because the man she knew first come back from up around Clark County, and I got mad and quit the country. I was bad cut up over that and throwed away all the money ever I had saved up, every durn cent, on drink and one thing and another. Then I come up here in the St Lucy country to work for old Mrs Wingate, sharen half and half. Are you tired of my long-winded yarn?’
Ellen said that she was not tired. She wanted to hear more of the old man, Pike, but she stilled the question on her lips because the thought of him filled her with pain, a pain borrowed from the greater pain that centred about the thought of the girl near Master’s place. But she ruled her lips suddenly and asked the question she most wanted answered, whether the girl from near Master’s place had married the man who came back from Clark, but the answer, ‘Yes, oh yes, they hitched up,’ held no stored regrets.
When he was gone she went into the house, moving dreamily through the moonlit rooms. To marry and go away, the idea came into her mind slowly, spreading unevenly through her sense of the half-lit kitchen and her own room which was bright with a square of white light on the floor. She fell asleep with no formed wish in her mind and no decision, but when Nellie called her out of sleep soon after dawn, while she dressed quickly in the faded blue garment, she heard a catbird singing clear fine phrases on a post near her window, clear phrases that were high and thin, decisive and final, and she knew at the instant that she would marry Jasper and go with him wherever he went, and her happiness made a mist that floated about her body as she carried the feedings to the hogs and opened the chicken boxes. She would remember every movement of his face, as it looked away, lost in its story, as it turned to her again, leaning nearer, and his name came often to her throat and lingered there, on the verge of utterance, the word her mind had been seeking, now grown fixed and eternal. She moved through the morning, while the name grew in her being, surrounded by her own renewed beauty which identified itself each moment with every lovely thing her eyes recognised, such as the pattern of black and white on a chicken’s feather, as the figured undulations crisscrossed on the bark of the ash tree, the waves of the tall, full-grown corn. As the day passed, her need to see him grew, to rest her eyes upon his form and thus to quiet her longing. But the morning passed and her work did not take her to the fields and she did not once hear his voice admonishing the team in the upper fields or meadows. She remembered Albert Wingate and his treachery and thought with apprehension of old Mrs Wingate, who was torn two ways by her maternal passion and her avarice. Toward nightfall a great rain came with thunder and lightning. Coming in at dark Henry said that Albert had come back to the farm, he himself had seen him riding pell-mell through the pasture, and all through the night the security of her snug, weather-tight room mocked at her as it shut her away from the storm.
On the following day while she helped Henry cut the small tobacco crop, while the warm sun undulated through the crisp rain-cooled air, Pius Donahue went through the farm, stopping a short while but bringing no evil news of the night, and she knew that Jasper was safe. A sense of finality came to her with the splendour of the sun and a certainty that Jasper’s words had been real and were undiminished and that his want of her was actual. While she set the tobacco sticks evenly through the field, the physical pain that had bound her throat for a day grew less and went. Jasper came to the field late in the morning. Albert had come, he said, and had stripped his mother of her last earnings, making evil threats. He, Jasper, would not stay another year but he would go away out of the country and search for better land, and when he had found a place he would come back for her, if she were of a mind to go with him, and that was what he had come to ascertain. The sooner he left Wingate’s place the better. She, Ellen, was the best favoured girl he had ever set his mind on having and that surely was a token. He would leave as soon as he could be released without a total loss and they would go. He would take her to his mother’s grave some day after they were gone. It was far past Stonebridge Church and grown in weeds perhaps by this time, but they would make it smooth and decent before they came away, and she murmured that she would plant a flower beside it, a rose or a little clump of sweet williams such as she had seen before the priory door at St Lucy, for they were a fair sight with their round clusters of pink bloom that made a sweet smell all about. When Henry came back from the barn, where he had been to haul a load of the cut tobacco, Jasper said that he must go for he had much to do before nightfall.
‘I aim to hunt out a hollow somewheres to use to fatten the hogs,’ he whispered to Ellen as they stood beside the fence. ‘Some well-hid place off on the back of the farm. A new-styled prodigal, Albert is. He drove off the fatted calf. I taken a heap of pains with that-there heifer, too. Let it suck three months and over. It was my aim to make a high-priced cow that time.’
Ellen told Nellie that she was going away with Jasper when all the crops were housed, and Nellie and Henry were both well pleased. Nellie said that Ellen must save all the feathers from the geese and add to these all the
plucked feathers laid away, for every girl should bring to her marriage a soft bed to lie in. When Tarbell stopped at the toll house door Ellen would seldom go outside. Instead she would busy herself in the yard, and she would neither eat his fringe-papered taffy drops nor read the declarations printed within the wrapper. In the evening Jasper would come and Ellen would sit with him on the steps before the door. She would hear his high whistled phrase, a bit of some old song imperfectly remembered, penetrating every room of the cabin, and she would finish her task in gladness, knowing that he waited on the step before the door or on the stile under the ash tree. He would tell her of how things lay between him and Albert, of his fears and precautions. The autumn was approaching darkly in the house under the great poplars, old Mrs Wingate tearing her rags and muttering her evil sayings. Jasper continued to bring Ellen each bit of cash he was paid as he had done since he had first made her his banker in the spring, and she hid the money deep in the locked chest, near two hundred dollars now. One dusk she brought it out for him to count and the sum pleased him very much, but he told her to put it back and he would be bringing more when the hogs were sold, and the whole sum would buy them their start in some better country, some fertile, well-watered land. He showed her his scars and told her how he had got each one, by what fights or accidents, and she drove her mind back into his experiences to try to merge with his sorrows and his pleasures and to share each one and to hold all in her thoughts. Or she would sit quietly on the step beside him, reposing in the quiet of his embrace, and they would speak to each other softly.
He had built a pen for the swine, far back among the hills where a little spring trickled out of the stones and made a damp place below in the soil. He had cut posts from the cedar glades and had hewed out knotty rails, enclosing a space about twenty feet wide which bent and turned with the flow of the hills. Over one end of the enclosure he had built a high platform and onto this he often loaded a great pile of fodder which was thus kept high, away from the hogs but always ready at feeding times. After he had brought the swine to the pen – eleven great shoats ready for fattening – he went down to the ravine twice each day to throw down fodder from the platform, but he was careful to make no paths as he went. The hogs churned the moistened soil into a cool wallow and there they lay all day, or they aroused themselves to crunch the corn he threw to them or returned to suck the wasted grains out of the mud. He told no one but Ellen where he had built the secret sty and how much labour had gone into hewing the rails and setting the platform.
They would speak to each other, gathering their thought gently about their common wish, or he would thunder out an imprecation upon his enemies until the massive angles of his face broke into new and harder lines and his shoulders twitched to be spending their strength. Then Ellen would gather herself into the heart of his brawn and feel herself at the core of his power while the waves of it sundered the air and beat on the cracked fragments of the night, or she would lay her fingers on his face and his throat and brush lightly away their hate while she gathered outward in his being, one now with his smile and his embrace. As September passed she would sit wrapped in her old long coat, for the nights were chilled as the season of the first frost drew near. The hogs were taking on their fat daily, he said, for their corn was never stinted, and when they were sold he would market the hay and then all would be done. They would be free to go, sooner than the first of the year, perhaps before December. They would speak softly, the one to the other.
‘Hear the dogs howl,’ she said, ‘off toward Stigall’s it is. It’s a lonesome sound, like the end of the world. Are you afeared of the end of the world?’
‘I feel like I could pick up a hill or I could break open a mountain with my fist, and what call have I got to be afeared of a lonesome sound tonight? But it’s a lonesome one.’
‘Lonesome like doves a-callen in trees to each other. Did you ever in your time hear a dove call and then another one answers?’
‘I could pick up a hill with my strength.’
‘One asks the question, the doves, and then the other comes right along with the next call.’
‘I could pick up a hill or I could break open a rock with my fist.’
‘It’s the sorrowfulest sound there is, as if it knowed what would come. Fair and sorrowful all together. It calls to mind good times that are lost and bad sorrowful ones, both gone together somehow.’
‘I take notice of doves a heap in spring. A dove call denotes spring is come for sure, and it’s safe then to plant corn.’
‘And a dove has got one drop of human blood in its body somewheres, they say.’
‘By spring I aim to find some fields worth a man’s strength. I’m plumb tired trafficken about, good land and bad as it comes. I aim to go a long piece from here.’
‘Once when I was a youngone Pappy went to Tennessee and I saw cotton in bloom. We saw cotton grow.’
‘I’m plumb tired a-trafficken about.’
‘Saw cotton a-growen. The people gathered it after a while in big baskets, piled up white.’
‘We’ll go to some pretty country where the fields lay out fair and smooth. A little clump of woodland. Just enough to shade the cows at noon.’
‘Smooth pasture is a pretty sight in a country, rollen up and cows dotted here and yon over it, red shorthorns and white and dun.’
‘And you won’t say “I know a prettier country in Adair or in Shelby or Tennessee.” Mountains or not.’
‘Smooth pastures, we’ll have.’
‘Whatever I can do to pleasure you, Ellie. The house like the way you want.’
‘And the house fixed up, the shutters mended and the porch don’t leak. To sit on a Saturday when the work is done. A vine up over the chimney. Once I saw a far piece from here…’
‘The stumps all pulled and the roots grubbed out.’
‘A parlour to sit back in when the busy season is over.’
‘The stumps pulled and the roots grubbed out, the plough to slip easy through the field dirt. No root snags to tear your very guts outen you.’
‘A parlour to sit back in cool when the busy season is done. Stairs to go up and down maybe.’
‘A real tobacco patch, not some little acre bed. Some land to set your back to proper.’
‘And when you stand in the door of the house you could see the fields roll off, green, some of them, and some ploughed, and far off the knob hills with blue… Birds in the trees in the spring of the year. Springbirds and redbreasts…’
‘And in the winter drive the crop to town and sell for a fair price, prime good burley leaf, twelve cents a pound.’
One day in October, while Ellen sat on the stoop to shell the corn for the hens, Bell came along the road, returning from the store, her loosely-hung mouth working noisily over the taffy she had bought. There had been no one but the storekeeper at the store that day, she said, but the day before there had been others.
‘Well, there was several there yester,’ she answered, being idly asked. ‘There was J.B. Tarbell and Mr Lucas and Pius. Then there was Albert Wingate and a town man. J.B. Tarbell he didn’t buy e’er thing. Then Ambrose Mudd was there and I set a right smart while and listened. Tarbell he said he seen a sight today as he taken a shortcut through Wingate’s to the creek. He says that-there Kent ain’t right in his mind, he reckoned. Got his hogs away back half a mile from the house to fatten. Down in a gully, he said, hard to get to, and there he’s got a whole parcel of hogs fenced up in a pen. Everybody laughed. Said he’d taken trouble to make a pen, hewed right outen the scrub cedars, and all the time he’s got a good pen right up alongside the barn. Said Jasper Kent ain’t right in his head. Then Albert said which gully was it, and Ambrose said that reminds him he needs a few ten-penny nails and to give him a dime’s worthen. I set and listened a right smart while.’
Ellen watched for Jasper to return from the shop toward St Lucy where she knew that he had gone, but when he did not pass she thought he might have walked through the fields abov
e the quarry. After they had eaten supper Ellen and Henry went toward the back of the farm, climbing the fence into Wingate’s scrubby woodland. They went into the ravines and Ellen found the place where the swine had been penned; but the enclosure was broken down and the hogs were gone. They went slowly back onto the high pasture and walked along the crest of the ridge above the stone pit, uncertainly going. Henry thought that Jasper had probably moved the hogs to some other place, and they studied out the possibilities of this, uneasy and troubled. They climbed the fence into Wingate’s field and took Jasper’s path toward the barn. The night was dark because of a clouded moon and the old house loomed very great in the midst of its shadows. They could hear great cries and oaths and sounds of scuffling within the house, where one light burned dimly behind a back window. After a while a door was flung open and Jasper stood in the light of the door frame, and then two, Jasper and another, lunged upon each other, their cries and curses sounding loud through the open door. Then Jasper sprang at another’s throat and bent him down with his hand, holding him back upon the floor, and the door was closed. After that there was a long time of quiet.
Ellen and Henry went back to the barnyard and hid behind the tall fence. The noises inside the house had fallen away, but now and then an undetermined figure would move slowly through the door of the house or across the grass beyond the well path. A shape would loom under the trees and go bending away toward the road. A strange footstep came from the barn, and then, after a long stillness, a running step came from the garden. Henry whispered to Ellen that they would go further back, that they would go to the tall brush at the side of the pasture, away from the house, and Ellen followed him there. After they were in the thicket beyond the yard, Ellen saw Jasper come out of the barn carrying a lighted lantern, but at the door of the barn he set the lantern down and went away for a short time. When he came back he was leading a plough horse, and this he took inside, fastening it into a stall. He was slow in his movements, plodding wearily. ‘He thinks Albert went off,’ she whispered to Henry; ‘He thinks they’re all gone off somewheres,’ and she was afraid for him, remembering the step in the garden. A few drops of rain began to fall, hanging rather in the quiet heavy air. She moved down the grove, no longer able to see the front of the barn, but she thought she might draw nearer from the back and call out to Jasper to come away. Suddenly the light, which she now saw through the cracks in the barn, went out, and noises of scuffling feet came from the barn and the barnyard, or Jasper’s voice came, or another voice called back to him, broken and angry. They were struggling behind the crib, lost in the shadows of the buildings, their cuffs and blows and oaths coming sharply out of the dark, or there would be a still moment following a deeply breathed cry. Then Jasper came alone out of the side of the corncrib and stood a short space, and Ellen called out his name. As he came toward the thicket she spoke again, and Henry came down from the upper part of the grove. Then they walked off through the trees, Jasper wiping the sweat and blood from his face, still breathing hard from his exhaustion, walking unevenly. He carried a pistol in his hand.
The Time of Man Page 24