Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Nights when the west wind came softly up at dusk and brought a smell of smoke and ripened corn, and hinted too of some farther world, a land behind the wind, she would be restless, fidgeting with her sewing by the fire, and often seizing a water bucket from the kitchen and running to the well on the pretext that she wanted a cold drink.

  She liked to stand by the well on a windy moonlit night, hear the soft, sad moan of the white pines by the gate, the whine and swish of beech twigs in the grove, and the deeper, farther wail of the wind in the high back hills. The world was a pattern in black and silver

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  with shimmering pearl-gray clouds racing faster than the moon. On such nights something in her blood raced with the wind, and the nameless wanting was like a live thing stronger than she. Somewhere there was a life to match the wild free beauty of the night, a something that would make her rich and full and satisfied, not leave her like a daft thing staring at the moon.

  It was on nights in fall like these that Azariah and the ones before him came alive, as if she had only to blow the old hunting horn and they would come. She had heard many tales of the ones before Azariah and the ones who came with him, stories handed down for three hundred years and joining many countries. Never tales of heroes, sometimes of women, but mostly of men, tall, blue-eyed, black-bearded men who chewed tobacco and swore long oaths, men who could shoot and ride and fight, men with great shoulders and mighty hands that could heave a cannon from a mud hole or set the timbers of a stockade into place.

  Men who were ever restless, great hunters who bred children to go west and north and south. There were those out of Ireland who had sailed down Shannon Bay in 1665. What was it they had wanted or hunted when they broke with their King in England, went first to Scotland, then to Ireland, out of Ireland into wild unsettled Virginia, with children and grandchildren scattering in North Carolina, fighting at King's Mountain in the Revolution, and then, first Azariah alone, later a handful of others coming through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky? And those out of Holland, why did they leave Holland for New York, their children leave New York for the backwoods of Pennsylvania, some leave Pennsylvania for the Revolution and finished with that, take a flat boat down the Ohio, and at some nameless point on the river strike out cast for the backwoods of Kentucky? Why did some, forced out of France, go first to Canada, push down into Vincennes in Indiana, and from there come down to the hills? What was it they had wanted? Not the rich fat cane brakes by the creeks and rivers, or the wildness of the hills. Or had they thought that here in the Little South Fork Country they might find the things she wanted now, the things that others went out from the hills to findnot land or timber or game, possessions to hold in their hands and say, "This is my own"? They must have laughed at the simple having, else they would never have gone on.

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  Maybe they had wanted only to live as they pleased, or maybe they had simply wanted the knowing, had been forced onward always by the wonder of what lay over the next hill. They must have stood and sniffed the west wind and dreamed of another life and another land, not old and stale and tight with all the brightness gone like this.

  Then Fronie or Nance, the middle aged hired girl, would be calling, "Delph-i-i-ine, you'll catch your death a cold a standin' in th' wind," and she would go, slowly with the brimming pail, back to the house, but linger maybe on the back kitchen porch until someone called again.

  The family would be sitting in the front room next to the parlor, about a low fire that seemed like the rest of the place, dead and quiet and old. Nights, Fronie and Nance pieced quilts or mended while John read, usually the Bible or some political pamphlet. His four young sons, though noisy enough outdoors, were always quiet, good like sober-minded little men when under their mother's eyes. Even the baby, hardly old enough to walk, seemed quieter than a baby ought to be.

  After the outdoors the room was chokingly warm and still, with the lamplight thick and ugly as compared to the light of the moon, and the slow heavy ticking of the front hall clock more like deepening notes of silence than sound. And the faint cry of the wind in the high back hills was smothered and far away.

  Sometimes there was scant slow-worded conversation, bits of gossip about the neighbors, talk of roads, and politics, and religion, and the weather. When in John's presence Fronie never mentioned Delph's misdeeds for John, though given to stern ways and quick outbursts of anger, had no love of quarreling. Many nights he tried to talk with Delph about this thing or that, but usually his conversations began and ended with the weather. "We'll have a hard killin' frost one a these nights that'll catch all your flowers, Delph," he would say or some such, and Delph would answer, "I'll be watchin' an' cut 'em all before they die."

  She saw the doom of her flowers one night when she climbed the pasture hill on pretext of hunting the cows. The sunset was clear, shading through a band of yellow light flung like a scarf over the farthest hills, rising up through blue-green waves into a blue that was

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  neither dark nor light, but that still deep blue that belonged to a frost promising sky.

  She lingered a time, and stared at the indistinct ribbon of whitish limestone road that ran along Little South Fork Creek. She watched the road without taking away her eyes, hardly conscious that moment by moment it darkened, until a sudden whispered wail of wind in the one oak tree on the hill caused her to raise her head. When she looked again the road was faint and dim like a thread of gray smoke against a gray sky.

  She had always liked to watch a road or path, hoping that something strange or new would pass, but of late when she saw a road she thought only of Marsh. There was always the chance that some errand or excuse would bring him down into the Little South Fork Country, or maybe up the hill by Costello's place.

  When the road had faded and there was no longer hope of his coming she continued to look at the hills; dark mysterious things marching into the west, like Marsh going away. He was out there somewhere and she wondered when she would see him again. Three days now since their last meeting, and the time seemed long, endlessly stretching away like the hills behind the hills and the bottomless sweep of the sky.

  Here on the high knoll, nothing hemmed the sky or rose against it; the hills and nearer trees were dark puny things against the high blue-green roof that, like some great crystal, held still the last brightness of the sun. She looked up into it and felt a moment's understanding of the bigness and the wonder of the world. It was there while she wasted her days on a hill in the back country, where the seasons and the weather marked the difference in the days, and living men clung to the old ways of their dead; a place where small things made a life, and mere nothings like the coming of the hard frost and cutting of her flowers seemed tragedies.

  She ran down through the pasture, and there were tears in her eyes that had nothing to do with the frosty coldand not at all tears for the death of her flowers. She laid up the top bar across the lane, and turned toward the yellow glow of lantern light that marked a cow's stable in the barn. Juber was milking in the stable; his hands moving in time to the slow words of the old tale he told seven-year-old Jobe, second oldest of her cousins. It was the story of the big

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  white rabbit that led all good dogs to their particular heavens when they died.

  She had heard the story numberless times since she was four years old and Juber had comforted her with it when Lee, her father's blue nosed fox hound died. She had needed comfort then, for that was the fall after her mother went away, and the autumn rains that year had seemed like tears trickling from some sad faced sky. Now she stood in the stable door and listened, and it was much the same; the child and man dressed much alike in blue shirts and copper-riveted overalls and unpolished raw hide shoes, the lantern flame weaving gently within its smoke-encrusted globe, and Daisy, the red cow, turning her head toward Juber with a look of listening in her gentle eyes, as if she liked to hear the words accompanied always by a solemn shake of the teller'
s head, ''An' they never catch him, an' he never runs away so all they do is foller.''

  And Young Jobe asked, as she had asked, "An' where does th' rabbit lead th' good dogs when they die?"

  Juber answered as he always did, "Ain't that heaven enough for any dawg, always chasin' a big white rabbit that leads him along through prettin' huntin' country?" He saw her in the door and asked, "Delph, it feels like frost in th' cow's teats. What do you think?"

  "It looked it in th' sunset," she answered, and knew that he was thinking of the flowers. He stripped Daisy slowly with the absentminded motions of a man trying hard to make up his mind. At last he said, "You'd better cut 'em, Delph. I reckon their time's come."

  It was hardly light enough for walking on strange ground, but the flowers shone faintly as if they had caught a bit of the sunset and would not let it go. In the still air the scent of the chrysanthemums came sharp and stinging like a part of the cold against her face. She liked that sharpness better than the sweetness of roses or of iris. It made her think of spice, and folds of red silk, crisp and rustling, and rich mysterious countries where the ways of life were different from her own.

  She cut until her arms were filled, and carried them across the front porch and into the seldom used parlor, and there laid them on the cold hearth by the potted touch-me-nots and maiden hair fern. She shivered and hurried from the ghostly shadowy place with its

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  curious smells of old wood and old horse hair in the sofa. She sometimes thought it was the fault of the parlor and not entirely that of the organ which, no matter how fast she pumped or hard she pounded, could never be made to play a tune livelier than "The Drunkard's Grave."

  She ran to cut the cosmos by the well, and the late blooming dahlias and marigolds in the garden, but stopped for a last look at the still, red-flushed sky where one large star looked lost and pale against the angry glow. The one star in the empty, frost-promising sky seemed old and familiar. Last fall she had cut the flowers in a cold clear twilight like this and the fall before, and maybe the fall before thatshe couldn't remember. And each time the flowers had made her sad. Next fall she would cut them again, and be sad again, and then the fall after, and on and on. Her grandmother Costello had cut chrysanthemums in this same yard for more than fifty years, the same flowers growing in the same places, and each time she must have thought of the fall before and the fall to come after.

  She thought of those others, now dead, and it did not seem that it was she, Delph, who had cut the flowers, but her grandmother, or her great-grandmother, some old, old woman who had lived beyond her time, always here and always cutting flowers that never died, but once between the cuttings she would die. And that would be all.

  She whirled and ran blindly through the heavy twilight, but stopped abruptly when she almost ran against John as he came in from the garden with baskets of green tomatoes and peppers. "You scared, Delph?" he asked, and looked down and tried to find her eyes.

  She shook her head. "N-o-o. I was just runnin'."

  "You sound like you're cryin', Delph," he went on in the gruff tone that was his nearest approach to gentleness.

  "A little bitmaybe. It's kind of sad to cut th' flowersan' a sky like th' one tonight gives me a funny feelin'."

  He nodded and looked at the evening sky, then smiled his slow stiff smile. "It does when a body's young," he said. "Used to be when th' older boys had all gone west an' just me an' your gran' parents I'd be like youlookin' out after them th' way you do on th' high knollbut you'll get over it," he comforted, and patted her shoulder awkwardly, the only form of caress she could remember ever having had from him.

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  She went into the house and lighted the parlor lamp with its circles of fat owls on its fat globes, and put the flowers in water. Finished with that she took the county paper, and slipped up the front stairs to her own room; a place that had long scandalized Fronie with its bright cushions and curtains and red hearth rug that gave the old solid black walnut furniture a rakish, tipsy air.

  She sat in her red cushioned rocker, and searched through the county paper without reading any of the news until low in one corner of the front page she found an item which she read, then took scissors from the center table and cut it out, after stopping to read it a second time. She didn't know the girl of whom she read; but she was a girl from Fincastle County who had gone away and done something. That was enough. Her name was Minnie Weaver, and she had taken nurse's training at a hospital in Louisville, and had finished second highest in her class, and now had a position in a clinic, the paper said.

  Delph went to the marble-topped dresser and from a bottom drawer took a tube of mucilage and scrap book filled with reports of those who had gone away. There were many of them; failures whose going was chronicled once and forgotten; successful ones who became doctors and lawyers and preachers in cities, and wrote letters to the county paper saying how much they would like to visit in "dear old Fincastle County."

  First in the scrap book was Samuel Dodson Fairchild, son of Dorie. Tonight, Delph held the page close under the lamp and studied it as she had done many times. The picture was dim and blurred on the cheap paper, beginning to yellow with age, for Fronie, always a great respecter of Dorie, had cut the clipping a long while ago when Delph was too small to think much of such things. Sam looked young, hardly more than a boy, and though his mouth was closed, he seemed to be laughing at something. The puzzle of his laughter would hold her for minutes; she thought sometimes that maybe Azariah had laughed that way when Jane, his wife, had wanted him to settle down and farm. She wished Sam would write a letter to the paper or to the church on some Memorial Day; but she guessed he never would. Among all the names and faces in the scrap book, his she thought had gone the farthest and seen the most. He had been written about in the Lexington papers, too; how smart he was in college,

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  and the scholarship he had won in chemistryhis picture was with that. There was another clipping about his having gone to Heidelberg to study, and a later one saying that he had accepted a position in a small town near New York City.

  Chemistry and New York City; they were such exciting words; one, all that was fine in the cities of the earth; the other, name of a mysterious learning of which few in the Little South Fork Country had ever heard, something difficult that only those with brains could learn. She would have studied chemistry, learned at least what it was, could she have taken her last year of high school. Now, most like she would never know. She thought of Marsh; chemistry didn't seem to matternow.

  Fronie called her to supper, and she went down, sorry to leave her room and mingle with the rest of the family; Marsh seemed nearer when she was alone. The talk at supper was mostly of the sharpening cold and coming hard frost, with Fronie planning to make green tomato ketchup from all the odds and ends of green things taken from the garden, while Juber sighed for the Hedrick cane. Hedricks were still at the molasses making, and cold weather had come to catch them with a great mound of cut but unstripped cane.

  John set down his coffee cup and looked at Delph. "Permelie was sayin' when I was down at th' store that Hedricks aimed to have a little cane strippin'sort oftonight. Whyn't you an' Juber go an' give 'em a hand."

  Fronie opened her mouth for disapproval, but closed it again when John continued to Delph, "You ought to be neighborly."

  "Standin' out half th' night is liable to give her cold," Fronie objected, while Delph was silent, waiting until they should agree. She didn't care whether she went or stayed. Marsh wouldn't be there. He'd never risk coming on this side of the creekcertainly not to a place like Hedricks' where there were young girlsand old Sil Hedrick hated oil men as much as he hated non-believers in his faith. The people there would look at her, then whisper to each other with their eyes. Some suspected that she met the oil man in the woods. But she wasn't ashamed. She knew she did no wrong.

  "Tilly's got a loose shoe, an' I can't go," she suddenly said, after thinking a mo
ment of the eyes.

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  "You could ride one a th' mules," John insisted, and Fronie wailed, "John, John don't have her doin' that. There's nothin' looks worse or trashier than a woman ridin' a mule. I'd as soon see her on that half wild stallion."

  "No woman could ever manage Silver," John said, and Delph was immediately eager to go, rushing upstairs for her wraps, rushing Juber away to the barn the minute he finished his pie and second cup of coffee. When he had saddled the mule he always rode, she pointed to John's heavy saddle and said, "Now put that on Silver."