The Time of Man

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts

  ‘What’s that you say to me?’

  ‘No brat of Joe Phillips can be borned in my house.’

  ‘Who’s thought to be born a brat of Joe Phillips in your house?’

  ‘You ask it!’

  ‘You got little call to talk to me, you!’

  ‘I say what I mean, now. Not in my house.’

  After that they did not speak for many days. Jasper called upon Nannie for his wants and spent but little time about the cabin. Sometimes he would take the boys to fish. Ellen sickened often and lay on her bed, scarcely knowing that she breathed. The entire bitterness and hate of the summer gathered into each moment and into each brief interchange with Jasper. After many days in which he had not spoken to her, he turned upon her one evening as they passed in the yard.

  ‘Joe Phillips, why don’t he support you? Cheap, he is. Has he made his plans to bring up his brat?’

  The cold of the autumn found the children unprepared, their garments thin and ragged. Ellen would rouse herself from her bed to guide Hen or Nannie in preparing the food and lie stiffly down again. She would answer dully if Marthy Shuck came, giving her ready-made replies. Jasper left money on the shelf as he always had, but he spoke but little and she never addressed him.

  ‘I was a cock-eyed fool,’ he said. ‘Not sense enough to see my hand afore my eyes.’

  ‘You think you see a far piece now, don’t you?’

  ‘Right afore my eyes, and me not sense enough.’

  ‘I reckon you got your good eyesight from Hester Shuck. Her eyes are good, God knows.’

  Each tried to hurt the other more, thrust after thrust, and they haggled over the unborn.

  ‘I don’t aim to stay on Joe Philip’s place e’er other year,’ Jasper said one night to Hen and Joe. ‘I’ll be off against spring comes.’

  The cold of January bit through the thin boards of the house and made frost on the windows and latches. Ellen never went to the woodpile now. She trusted Hen and Nannie to bring the wood Jasper had cut. ‘February, and I’ll be gone from here,’ Jasper said over and over, speaking always to Nannie or Hen. Ellen lay on her bed almost continually, scarcely knowing that she continued in life.

  ‘I reckon you think you’ll run off,’ she spoke once out of a long silence. ‘I reckon you think you’ll run. I see you a-goen! You’ll not run off, Jasper Kent. I know you too well. You’ll not run off from your youngones. You’re tied down with a whole bale of rope.’

  There were cold days when Jasper stayed in the cabin to cook the food. Once when the children were in the kitchen at the table he came to the sleeping room for some coat and said tauntingly to her, ‘I reckon Joe Phillips he fetches down fine victuals when I’m gone to work. I see you got no appetite now.’

  ‘I got victuals you don’t know e’er thing about,’ she said. And then she added out of some dreaming state, as if she forgot her anger, ‘I reckon you’d think I was a-lyen if I said I haven’t seen Phillips in four months or over, not even laid eyes on Phillips.’

  ‘Well, you can see the fine rich man all you want after a little spell. I aim to go right soon. I reckon he’s afeared of me.’

  ‘You’ll never get off, Jasper Kent. You’re tied a heap tighter’n you know for. You are wedded up tight, Jasper Kent.’

  ‘I already told Phillips I aim to be off.’

  ‘All right, but you won’t go unwedded. You’ll see.’

  ‘I’ll go. And I’ll take the four youngones, my youngones. You can keep the balance for yourself.’

  She laughed at him. ‘You think you can ever get Hen and Nannie and Dick and Joe away from me? God knows, you’re simple, Jasper Kent. And you yourself are wedded deep. Not even Hester Shuck could unwed you.’

  ‘Hester she’s got ne’er thing to do about this.’

  ‘How you know Joe is your youngone?’ She could not let him be.

  ‘Nohow, you’ll find me gone some day soon. I aim to be gone afore March. I already got a place to go to. And afore I go I aim to make Joe Phillips feel the whole weight of my strength in his face. I’ll gouge his heart outen his chest and more, afore I go. I aim to wait till I get ready to leave here. That’s my aim, but I might not hold out to wait. Let me get a hold on his entrails, for God’s sake.’

  ‘What a fool he is. In the law again, he’ll be, in the jail, maybe. I’ll sell my cow maybe to pay you out.’

  ‘But I’ll keep my hands offen you. I’m no brute nohow. I’ll not touch you, but I ought.’

  ‘I’ll sell my cow Wakefield gave me and put alongside the money my trifle I saved for the machine. To bail you outen jail, Jasper.’

  ‘I’ll gouge his heart outen his body and empty out his body of his guts. My whole strength in his face.’

  ‘And Joe Phillips, he’ll go on your bond. Sign your papers that you won’t run off. God knows.’

  ‘God knows!’

  ‘Wedded deep, you are.’

  ‘I’ll tear his brains outen his skull. Afore I go. Any day now.’

  One bright morning in early February Ellen fastened the small children into the kitchen, tying the latch with a string. Then she bore her child alone, being finally delivered toward the noon of the day. When Jasper came he broke the string with a blow on the door and went in where she lay, the child beside her rolled in a piece of an old blanket. The child was a thin wizened creature, the skin pulled gauntly over its bony face. With its long protruding skull and its wrinkled brow it looked like a dwarfed image of an old man, as Jasper would look if he lived to be a hundred years old. When it began to cry a strange wail, the thin cry of the newborn seemed to be coming from Jasper as an old withered man, and Ellen covered the child with her arms and hid it in her bosom. It was March before they moved away although Phillips told Jasper he need not hurry, he might take his time about finding a place for his family to live, but Jasper said that he had as well go now as later. He would work that year on Robinson’s farm and the house there was vacant; he would go as soon as the winter broke. The infant was soon very much endeared to the other children, who began to call him Chick as they played about him, and after a little that name was established and the child seemed much too precious to be encumbered with any name less light. ‘After a while I will name him, Thomas maybe, or Albert,’ Ellen said, or she would say that Jasper might choose the name. ‘Thomas Albert,’ Jasper said, ‘after while, when he’s bigger we’ll call him Tom or Al.’ Then he had Job Tucker make a new cradle, stinting nothing in the wood or the work, and Job took seasoned cherry boards which he had saved for some fine task and rubbed the finished pieces with oil until they shone darkly red, the finest cradle he had ever made, he said. Chick was so little and thin that one scarcely knew that one held him in arms. He gained a few pounds in weight as the months passed but he kept his look of great age, his bulging forehead and his long unfleshed jaws.

  At Robinson’s place the house stood close beside the road, but a few feet back from the fenceline. Wagons rumbling along the way would wake the infant from his sleep. Ellen mended the rude coops and cleared them of vermin and set her hens on fresh straw which Jasper brought. The money she had saved for the machine went, a little here and a little there, and it was gone, blankets for Chick, medicine and infant foods. The child often fell into paroxysms or lay half asleep. Ellen and Jasper went softly about the house, or they spoke softly to each other from room to room. At the end of the year they went to McKnight’s farm, three miles further on the road. It mattered much less to her now what country she lived in, here or there, or whether there was a tree in the yard or a spring or a well for water, a stove for heat or a fireplace. A year on Robinson’s place, a year on McKnight’s, it was all one, or if there was a hoe to dig the garden or a mattock, a fork or a spade. If there were vermin in the hen coops her labour was doubled; it was all one. Hen and Nannie and Joe would read their small books by the fire after supper or they would rouse little Chick to play with them, but the light in his eyes was faint. Ellen set her strength to work all the harder
because of Chick, planting more because of him, and when he lay wanly uncommitted to life she would work over the bean rows with the mattock. She must work in the garden and so her work there became a fervour of service to the child.

  ‘But he looks old,’ Joe said, ‘like old men. What makes him look so funny, Mammy?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He feels hard, but crumbly when you take him up. And he smells sour, or bitter. That’s it. He smells bitter and tastes bitter.’

  Her work in the garden was a fervour of service to the child. Jasper would go out of the house softly in the morning so that Chick need not wake, but at noon, while he waited for the horses to rest and have their feed, he would play with the child and sing a great rousing song, and Chick would leap in his arms with the whole of his small strength and flush faintly pink under his blue-veined skin. Jasper and Chick had many understandings which hung about great raucous words that grew up, syllable by syllable, out of vast associations of past mirth and present wonder. Jasper would clap his hands, catch Chick’s eye and hold it for an instant, and then out would come the great nonsense word, thundered out of his stubby beard and poured over Chick’s small laughter. Ellen would watch them with a curious joy she could not bring into any relation with her pain.

  Breaking the soil her mind would penetrate the crumbling clod with a question that searched each new-turned lump of earth and pushed always more and more inwardly upon the ground, a lasting question that gathered around some unspoken word such as ‘why’ or ‘how’. Thus until her act of breaking open the clay was itself a search, as if she were digging carefully to find some buried morsel, some reply. Working among the hens or the swine, in the broad light of day, a wind tearing at her garments would awaken in her some sense of another time and another wish, another longing now forgotten and unknown but keeping some faint being in a half-known phrase said at some time long past on some windblown hill where stones were piled in a mound. And her lasting inquiry, her questioning anguish, would gather about this remote image, this phrase, and ask it, and beg it for redress, for remission, for pity. Or once, looking quickly up into the sky where the sun shone brightly, she remembered with a sudden flash of bright, pictured light a hill grave where the sun had poured over a white marble shaft and where she had sung of life with a great shout, and she turned upon that picture the whole of her questioning pain and begged of it for life for her child, as if she would pray that hour to take from herself half, even all, she had and give it to him. Or, in the yard, cutting the wood for the dinner fire, she would remember Chick’s spasm of the night before, his muscles tight and stiff and his face blue, his eyes half closed, and then his writhing body and his wild cries, and she would hate the pain that held the child and hate his withered limbs and his bent spine, until hate and pain would distort her own face and numb her mind. How she hated, but not the sleepless nights for herself till her limbs were like wood and her throat rasped with dry grief, nor Jasper, never complaining and never weary in his compassion, walking the floor with the child half the night after he had driven the plough all day. It was not this she hated, but the pain in the child, bending his spine and twisting his limbs, until she could not separate the pain from the suffering infant and she would hate Chick himself as she slashed at the firewood. Then she would throw down the axe and hurry to the house to lean over his pillow and settle his comforter nearer, or if he were awake she would take him to her bosom and hold him in a fervour of tenderness and kiss his sad little face and hold his hands to warm them.

  But Chick died. In the midst of his spasm one morning he grew limp in Ellen’s arms and she saw that he had changed. It was mid-morning and she was alone in the cabin, but her call brought Jasper. He knelt beside her chair while she held Chick, stroking his cold hands. They were both weeping.

  ‘He’s gone now,’ Ellen said. ‘Jasper honey, don’t cry.’

  ‘Poorly all his enduren days, and never a well hour, ne’er one.’

  Ellen stroked gently downward on the child’s eyelids and closed them, and settled his limbs. ‘Gone,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’ll take him to the bed now,’ Jasper said. ‘I’ll take him…’

  ‘No, no, not yet. I had him in arms so long. I couldn’t nohow put him by yet. No. Jasper honey, no, not yet, to take him away, not yet.’

  ‘Not one well day in three year, almost three, God knows!’

  ‘He never in all his time see any ease or comfort outen the earth.’

  ‘God knows!’

  ‘Bright too, ready to laugh whenever he could.’

  ‘He knowed us, all to the last one, and always wanted to play when he could notice.’

  ‘He knowed you best, Jasper, and liked you. I see him pick up his head when you’d come.’

  ‘I best take him, Ellie, take him to the bed. I’ll lay him out on…’

  ‘No, no, not yet.’

  ‘I’d best take him, Ellie.’

  ‘Always looked like you, Jasper, from the first, and look, he looks like you now.’

  ‘Always from the start, but hair like your’n, Ellie.’

  ‘And now he looks like you more. Now. He looks like you’ll look. When you’re dead, Jasper.’

  ‘God knows! Maybe he does.’

  They were both weeping, speaking between their sobs. Jasper knelt beside Ellen’s chair, his hands at his face.

  ‘He knowed you best, Jasper, best of all. He knowed Hen and Nannie and Joe and Dick, but he knowed you the best and liked you first.’

  ‘I’ll take him now, to put him on the bed…’

  ‘No, no, not awhile yet. A little spell longer I’ll have him… See, he looks like you, Jasper, like you, more and more.’

  ‘God Almighty! He does!’

  ‘Like you dead…’

  ‘I better take him now. To put him by…’

  ‘No. He’s my baby I had all by myself with nobody to help. Hands offen him. Hands offen him.’

  ‘I best take him, Ellen, best…’

  ‘Hands offen him. He’s my baby I had without any to lift a hand’s stir for me. Stand offen him, Jasper Kent. And before he came… No help.’

  ‘You best let me lay him down now, Ellen, and rest yourself a spell.’

  ‘Get back a way, Jasper Kent. I maybe marked him with the way I took on afore he come. I couldn’t see to help. But he’s mine. He knowed you best and liked you, and I was glad for it. I was glad he liked you. But he’s mine and always was. I earned him all for myself. Get back offen him, Jasper Kent.’

  ‘God knows, you’re beside yourself, Ellen, and you best let me take him now, to rest you…’

  ‘And now he looks like you. Like you some time hence.’

  ‘Oh, God Almighty!’

  They wept a long while now, each in his place, Jasper calling aloud and Ellen bending over the still child. They wept thus until they were spent and quiet, and then for a while they were still.

  ‘You could take him now, Jasper,’ Ellen whispered at last. ‘You could take him and lay him out on the bed. Now you could.’

  ‘I’ll get Job Tucker to make a little box to be his coffin. Three miles will not be far to go,’ Jasper said while they stood beside the cot.

  ‘I’ll wrap him in a piece of fair cloth I got to make aprons for myself and Nannie. A fair piece, white it is, I bought from the store. Never a bit of ease outen the earth he had, in all his enduren life. Knowed you best and liked you first,’ she whispered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The wind blew almost always on this hilltop. It shook the old boards of the house and ravelled the stones from the chimney; it swayed the bough of the poplar tree beside the door and it turned the shade of the locust tree before the gate to quivering powdered shadows. Little Melissy could not remember beyond the Powers country, for she had been born here. The hills undulated freely under the cultivated fields and reached in rough sheer bluffs up to the ridge that divided these farms from the north country. The house stood on the crest of an upland that dipped to rise a
gain to a hill where open timber grew and where the unmilked cattle were pastured. It had, in the early days of the country, been the farmhouse, the centre of all its acres, and for this it was larger than tenant houses usually are, having four rooms and a loft. Hen was a tall boy now, becoming great in stature, like Jasper, his great gaunt arms strong to lift and haul. He had begun to chew tobacco. Some rumour of this had reached the fireside a year before, a hushed rumour, unconfirmed, but one day when Ellen sewed buttons on his garment a piece of the stuff rolled out onto the floor, spilled from his pocket.

  ‘For land’s sake, Hen,’ Ellen said, ‘a man grown already!’ After that no one questioned Hen’s coming and going. He worked for Jasper all day or he milked the cow for Ellen, a heifer from the first cow, which was gone now, a brown and tan beast that still bore the marks of the great Wakefield herd, and the last tie which bound Ellen to a past that was remembered perhaps infrequently, but held with constancy as a finished picture, complete and set apart, dimly shadowed but done, scarcely belonging to herself more than to another. The huckster came to her door to trade for butter, chickens, eggs, whatever she had. She hung the butter down in the well to keep it fresh and cool, the pail standing on a shelf halfway down the stone wall, to be drawn up with a rope. She went busily from day to day, eager with Nannie, making plans.

  ‘Here’s how Granny looks,’ Melissy said, sucking in her lips to look toothless. ‘Here’s Granny.’

  ‘Shame to you,’ Ellen said. ‘I’ll whip you and whip hard if I hear you make fun of your granny. Don’t let me hear e’er one of you make fun of your granny or your grandpap either. Granny, she’s old. It’s a shame to make fun of old folks. You’ll be old yourself some day.’