The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  Or hoeing out the weeds after the rains she would smile to think of what Hen had said about a bird: ‘And the jaybirds have got longer tails ’n common this year. I took notice to that early in spring.’

  Phillips would come to work at the grindstone that stood under the locust tree, grinding his tool for an hour or more, or he would get Ellen to sew the torn pocket of his coat, offering to pay her but she would take nothing; he had given them much. ‘Mrs Phillips, she won’t do e’er thing for Phillips,’ Jasper had said once long ago. Sometimes he would talk of Lester, one of his boys. ‘If only he wouldn’t lie to me, his pappy,’ he said. ‘Tells me he wants money to set up in business, and he’s got no business. Boy nineteen. A-goen to the dogs fast.’

  He was a lonesome man. Sometimes he would come every day to linger about Ellen’s yard, to watch her hands busy with the corn for the hens, busy with a garment she was sewing, busy with curds or cream. He would ask her advice.

  ‘What would you think of me to buy the Neal place?’ he asked. ‘Eighty-six acres, good corn land, fair at any rate, and for sale cheap. Would you think it too much for a man to take on?’

  ‘It would be a heap of work, two places not touchen each other, to come and go.’

  ‘I’d have to get another tenant for over there. Maybe it wouldn’t be a right good piece of business, like you say.’

  ‘A heap of corners to watch,’ she said. ‘Your hands already full. But I’m no trafficker to set up to know a heap.’

  Ellen had saved eighteen dollars toward her sewing machine, which was a very good sum, for she could buy one for twenty-seven or thirty dollars. Already the agent had come to her door, and he had said that he would come again in the summer. When the cherries ripened that year she sent a pail of them to Nellie along with a dozen early cabbage plants from her garden, proud she was to be able again to dispense gifts. It was late spring now, and Marthy Shuck came often, watching, curious, unable to find a way to say what was in her mind. Hester Shuck had ceased to come altogether, but now and then Ellen would meet her on the road.

  At the time of the planting of the corn Ellen knew that a change had come to Jasper; she knew it as she mended the fence behind the hen coops or as she hoed at the garden, as she sewed in the cabin or cooked the food; her days were full of the knowledge and all her acts went with it. Hester had had her way with Jasper. Once Nannie had said that she had seen Hester in the crab thicket at dusk, and again Ellen caught a glimpse of her there by the light of a newly risen moon. Jasper came from the field tired and sullen and if the children angered him he sent them early to bed. Often he went away after dark to return toward midnight, dull and silent, or he would cry out strange words in his sleep, lewd words and angered curses spoken out of some torment. He went often to the river with a man named Clark and there was another woman named Lena among them. When the knowledge had settled upon her, Ellen felt a curious hardness in her body, as if her life had grown solid and stiff within her flesh. She wondered why she cared who had Jasper, turning this thought over and over as she worked. When she thought of Hester in the crab thicket she wanted to go there and take her by the throat and choke the life back into her body until it turned hard and stiff like her own, until it hardened for death at last. At night, lying alone in her bed, she would want to go to the thicket with a knife in her hand, and her mind would keep remembering the knife in the kitchen beside the cups on the shelf. Joe Phillips had sharpened the knife at the grindstone. Then she would wonder why she cared who had Jasper and she would know that she would never so fall from her pride as to quarrel with Hester Shuck or to spy on the thicket or the river.

  Jasper would laugh in his sleep, choking on his lewd words, drowned in his lewd dream, or he would blurt of Hester Shuck’s bottle. All day Ellen would move from labour to labour, the garden, the kitchen, the cow, the milk house, her feet feeling the tug of the path toward the Shuck cabin and her throat aching with the words that would label Hester Shuck as a foul and bestial creature. The turmoil in her mind grew until she turned about in a maze, scarcely knowing whether the season were spring or fall, scarcely knowing one day from another. Since May she had known herself to be carrying another child, but she told Jasper nothing of this. She baked Jasper’s favourite cake but he ate it without noticing what he had. Then she dressed Nannie in her bright new dress and told her to take her father for a walk on Sunday, but he lay under the locust tree and slept. She wondered why she cared where Jasper went and why she contrived to try to bring him back, surprised at each plan she made, but the plans would arise suddenly out of her listless thought. She could not find that she cared whether he came or went and her days were full of her tasks as the summer came; he might go, what to her did it matter? She had saved twenty-two dollars for the sewing machine, and she thought that the agent would leave it for her if she made so large a payment as that. He would come later and collect the rest, as she would contrive to have it, and she would have the machine in the meanwhile, and her mind turned often toward it until she could clearly see the turning wheels and the throbbing needle carrying the thread, but through the thought of the machine lay the curious hardness felt in her body, a stiffness beneath her breath. Or sewing with her fingers, letting her mind dwell pleasantly upon the speed the machine would have and feeling the wheel at her fingertips and the anticipated flow of the treadle under her foot, she would come upon a swift image of her hand reaching for the knife that lay beside the cups, sharp now as a dagger since Joe Phillips had tooled it at the grindstone.

  Then she fixed her hair in soft coils and wore her bright cotton dress all day, at work or for rest. She walked up to the field where the men were at work in the wheat harvest, taking Nannie and Dick, showing them the falling bundles and the clicking knives. She took off her bonnet and let the sun fall on her hair, and she knew that the coils shone brightly in the sunlight and that her dress was a bright spot moving over the dull green of the field and that her step was proud as she went through the stubble. The men, all but Jasper, looked at her, saying pleasant things, and Joe Phillips offered her a cup of the fresh cold water he had just brought to the field in a large bucket. Then all the men came for water and she dipped the cups for them while they eagerly crowded about her, making pleasant jokes, but Jasper drank his draught and was away without pleasantry. When she came back from the field, leading Dick through the pasture and talking with Nannie, she knew that Joe Phillips had seen the sheen on her hair and had seen the strong lift of her bosom as she had walked through the cut grain, and had felt the vigour of her being. There was a pleasure to her in this in spite of the woodenness that gathered back into her body as she came down from the field, while she wondered why she had gone there and why she cared, even for one moment, to seem lovely before Jasper. He might play with his company along the river any night; she would never care again, she reflected, but her reflection became a determination and died of its own force, leaving a chaos which lasted until her pleasure in her own loveliness as reflected in Phillips arose again.

  Hen and Joe were waiting at the yard gate, expecting her, for they had climbed to the gate to peer out over the pasture. They had missed her and had found the yard unbearable without her there, unwilling to play until she was found again, and a great joy surged through her. There were stains of tears on Joe’s face; he had lost her with bitterness and fear, and she stopped at the gate a moment with all her children standing close about her feet. But passing through the yard her mind turned toward the crab thicket with a great hate and she sickened with hate as she neared the milk house and grew dizzy with pain and evilwishing as she passed over the door sill.

  Phillips was grinding a tool at the stone when she came from the garden one mid-afternoon, the wheat being cut now and the labour slack. She had pinned Nannie’s blue metal brooch on her breast and her hair was well coiled on her head. She set her basket in the shade beside the door of the house and carried the squashes to the milk house to keep them fresh. Jasper was coming across the pasture w
ith a sack of meal across the plough horse he was riding. She walked past the grindstone and spoke to Phillips as she tarried under the locust tree.

  ‘Where’s Hen to pour the water for you?’ she asked.

  ‘I squirt the water outen my mouth sometimes, when I’ve got nobody to pour,’ he said.

  She offered to pour the water this time. ‘I got little to do for a spell now. As well as not pour the water, I might.’

  ‘Your advice about the Neal place was prime good advice, as it turned out,’ he said, speaking softly as if continuing a confidence. ‘I got my hands full as ’tis.’

  ‘I don’t set up to be a first-rate trafficker. I only guessed it, seems like.’

  ‘You are a first rate guesser, Miss Ellen, you are. Prime.’

  She poured the water when he called for it, a little at a time. Jasper was carrying the meal across the yard and busying himself about the house door. He would wash himself in the kitchen, as he always did on Saturday, surly and indifferent, or jocularly indifferent, and then he would go away across the field to join Clark at the river. ‘I don’t countenance Hester’s way,’ Marthy had said the day before. ‘Hester, she don’t get but blame from me, now. If I had my way she’d go off afore sunset and take all her duds along to stay gone a spell.’ Marthy had said this to offer consolation and to shed all blame from herself.

  ‘That’s a pretty dress you got,’ Phillips said. ‘I noticed it one day when you came up the field. I saw you make it yourself, too, one day when you sewed, a-sitten on the bench all day. You are a master hand to make things, I see that long ago.’

  ‘I don’t set up as a prime trafficker in no way nor how,’ she said, but she was pleased at the praise of her skill.

  ‘I wish there was another one just like you, exactly like, you understand.’

  ‘She’d be a right smart way off from perfect, now.’

  ‘Exactly like and free, you understand.’

  ‘I don’t set up in no way to be perfect and I expect I aggravate a body a good deal.’

  ‘If ever you need, you understand, you just let me know, just send. If ever you want a friend or any help. As I just said I wish there was another just like you, exactly like, and don’t you forget what I say.’

  ‘You’d be tormented plumb outen your life inside a week,’ she said, beginning to laugh. Jasper was coming out of the house door, dressed now in the clean work clothes he would wear the next week. She talked brightly, laughing, wanting Jasper to see as he walked across the yard. ‘A stone that turns by a treadle, that would be the way to have it. Then a man would have a free hand to pour the water. Turns like a spinnen wheel.’

  ‘I had my eyes on you a right smart while,’ he said, whispering, ‘and I know you don’t laugh at a man that’s in earnest like I am.’

  ‘I don’t know why I laugh,’ she said. ‘I want to laugh all the time, maybe. I got to go now to get supper ready. Here’s Hen in the pasture now with the things I sent for at the store. I got to call Nannie to get the little chickens in and to see after the geese. I got a heap to do afore dark. Laugh I do. I reckon I haven’t cried for three year, no not for three, and I don’t aim to cry. A body that waits for me to cry will wait a long spell. A grindstone with a treadle to go by your foot-power is what ought to be. Maybe I’ve seen one in my time somewheres and that’s how it comes to mind now, and I can’t tell whe’r I made it up myself or not.’

  Jasper was going away across the pasture and she would not see him until the next day sometime or the day after. He had looked back from the gate just as she had laughed about the grindstone. Her thought followed Phillips home after he had gone and clung about him when she heard him calling his hogs at the barn. Later she saw his lantern light going about the stables. The children were hungry, clamouring endlessly, and Dick cried for Jasper when he had finished eating; his crying put a weariness upon the house as if the whimperings came out of the boards and out of the floor. She remembered Phillips and saw his firm hand turning the blade on the stone. Hen and Joe quarrelled and fought and Dick broke into tears over one thing and another. Nannie wandered a little way into the yard but returned to sit beside Ellen at the doorsill. ‘What’s the matter with tonight?’ she said once. ‘What’s so bad about the air? It pushes down on my breath.’

  Through the weeks she would hear Joe Phillips calling to the men in the fields or hammering at the barn where he was mending a roof. The weeds grew fast after the midsummer rains, but Ellen cared less to work at the garden, grown listless and weary. Nannie was going to school now, and Ellen would see the two of them, Nannie and Hen, running along the path or along the road, far past two farms, Hen with the dinner bucket and Nannie carrying the book; as she sat in the house she would see them. She would hear Phillips as he hammered at the barn, and hear the two small children humming at their play, their words lost under the purr of their voices, and her listlessness would give her each picture as something remote and unrelated to her own being, as felt through a veil, until the little children would float in an unreality so entire that they seemed to be any children, belonging to some other woman in some remote house. Or suddenly, under this withdrawing mist in which each sense had sunk and each obligation had drowned, would appear, more vivid than lightning, Hester Shuck’s way, gathering into sound, into words, and she would know all that Hester did and all Hester’s slobbering talk. The fact of Hester, in her face and in her acts and in her body, gathered into an oblique thought, blighted and throttled, shrinking back of half-said words: ‘When it comes knock it in the head with a stick of stovewood and bury it in the ash pile out behind the henhouse’: this was Hester. ‘A little red stringy brat, looks like a rabbit new skinned, God knows! look at it’: this was Hester. Ellen’s hand would feel for the knife as she sat limply in her chair, and her left hand would catch at Hester’s throat to still her vile breath. Or she would sink again into a half sleep and remember some task undone, hearing Dick and Joe as they talked at their play, floating back again into the unreality of their voices and the remoteness of every obligation. If she heard Phillips in the yard she would not stir from her place, and when he had talked a little with the children or when he had ground his tool, he would go away again. The sounds of one day blurred against those of another. The quiet of the morning would enhance the quality of her drowsing being and thus she would sit, idle and weak, until, to penetrate the fog, she would gather the ashes of some spent thought, torn snarls of knowing, and she would sometimes moan softly under the confusion. Hester Shuck, her way of crawling about in the thicket, turning herself into a sow; her dark hair; her wide jaws and deep hips: ‘a little red stringy brat, look at it!’ this was Hester. She knew the whole of Hester’s way; she could gather her together; she knew her in her own mind, saw her in bestial postures in a swift picture, as sharp as a lightning flash on a dark sky: ‘a sharp crack on the head with a stick of stovewood and bury it along with the chicken guts and feathers out behind the ash hopper.’

  The threshers had come to work in the wheat and the oats, the season being well spent now, and Ellen was to provide food for three of the hands while the others would eat at the farmer’s table. She was carrying water from the spring at the foot of the hill, hurrying to be ready for the heavy meal when the noon hour should come. Hester Shuck was gone from the country now; she and Lena had gone away together to the town, but later, Marthy said, they had gone to the city. Ellen could not find that she felt glad; she could not find that she felt anything. Nannie was glad and so also were the boys, although they did not know why, perhaps, except that Jasper had begun to take them with him to fish in the creek again. When Hester had been gone two weeks or more he said, carelessly, to Joe and Hen, ‘How are the fish poles? Busy season about over, we might fish a little, buddie.’ He would sit quietly on Sundays under the bench by the tree, speaking with latent hilarity to Nannie or the boys, or he would stare with a gentle gaze, turning from one thing to another, as if he looked upon his acts with surprise and forgiveness. Ellen cou
ld not find that she cared. The sense of hardness lingered in her body, stiffening her limbs and her mind. It was all one. Hester was gone. She was glad, no doubt; Nannie went with Jasper again to the creek and their song would come up from the hollow as they returned at dusk. Her own body was stiff and tired and she could see that her hands were thin. Except when she went to the spring to get water or when she went to the garden to get the dinner, she kept inside the house now almost all day. ‘We’ll have to feed three thresher hands,’ Jasper had said, standing uncertainly in the doorway. As she returned from the spring she moved dully across the yard, one with the dull load of the water as it drew upon her arm and shoulder. Jasper was coming across the pasture, walking rapidly, as if he came on some mission of great importance, bearing some news.

  He sent Dick and Joe outside and closed the kitchen door, turning to Ellen as she set the water pail on the table. He walked near her and said a few low words, accusing and threatening, and when he was gone, she continued to plod dully through her tasks, fitting his words slowly together and making for them a meaning. He had become aware of the unborn child and of the farmer’s liking for her at one time and he had held the two ideas together in his mind. His fist had tightened when he spoke to her. His words had gathered meaning as she cooked the food, piling up force as she turned them over in a mind, but his hate and his threat were immediately seen. She grew more frightened as the hour passed and her knees tottered as she went down the steps to the milk house. After a little the men came for dinner and she walked back and forth, serving their plates over and over. Jasper talked with the threshers during the meal, but afterward he went back to the field without speaking to her. That night she spoke to him in spite of her fear.