Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  "Thanks," he whispered, and turned away, but a shrilly whispered, "Lord, you've forgot your chair," caused him to turn and seize the chair in some confusion. The men were watching him now. He felt their eyes slip away from his face when he walked up and sat down near Willie Copenhaver and on the other side of the stove from John.

  He sat still, trying to hold the words he had gathered neat and straight in his bead, but they kept slipping away, scattered by the bits of conversation he heard, mostly on the tobacco market, just opening at Lexington. He heard John's deep, almost toneless, voice. "Me, I'd never fool with tobacco. It's too much like gamblin'."

  Sil Hedrick nodded, spat into the stove hearth, then turned to John and answered, "Last year white burley brought next to nothin'. This year them that has a good crop will be gettin' rich."

  Young Willie Copenhaver pulled a square of mahogany colored chewing tobacco from his jumper pocket, cut a fair sized plug, and offered knife and tobacco to Marsh. "Chew?" he asked.

  Marsh shook his head. "You don't smoke neither," Willie observed.

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  Marsh shook his head, more impatiently, and sat forward on the edge of his chair in order to see around the stove to John and the Ragan boy. Willie nudged him again. "You'd better take a chew a my tobacco. It's home made, ever' leaf smeared with honey and sprinkled with whiskey 'fore it was pressed more'n a year ago. One chew 'ud put heart in a daid corpse."

  "I've got heart a plenty an' to spare," Marsh said under some booming talk of Sil Hedrick's.

  Willie nodded toward John. "You'll need heart an' more when you talk with himlike I think you're aimin' to."

  Marsh looked into Willie's eyes, then glanced slowly over the faces of the other men on his side of the stove. Some looked at him, and some looked carefully past him, but in all the faces there was the same thing, a look of expectancy and of non-committal silence. Logan's younger brother flicked him with his eyes, then glanced at the busily talking John, and smiled, a slow secretive sort of smile. Marsh saw Sil Hedrick shift uneasily in his chair, glance in his direction, then back at John, absorbed still in the talk, and gesticulating with his pipe. It seemed that John, alone of all the company, was ignorant of what had been shaping between the oil man and his niece through the summer and the fall.

  Marsh got up and went to the other side of the stove, and stood with his back to the fire directly in front of John, and looked at him in the hope of catching his eye. When at last it seemed that every man in the room sat holding his breath and waiting, except John, the Ragan boy yawned with a lusty stretching and said, "This place is makin' me sleepy. I think I'll be gettin' up th' road." He looked at John, and asked with undue loudness, "Comin' along, Mr. Costello?I think this oil man here wants a word with you."

  John glanced at Marsh, puffed once on his pipe, took it from between his teeth, and asked, "Is it your team you're wantin' to sell me?I've heared you're leavin' th' country."

  "No. I'm not ready to sell my horses."

  John puffed his pipe again, blew out a slow drift of smoke, and considered Marsh with his calm eyes. "What is it then?"

  "I'd rather speak to you outside."

  "Trouble?If it's come to a scrap with Logan Ragan I'm no hand at takin' sides," John said, and looked neither troubled nor

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  inquisitive, only dead calm, with his eyes cold as quartz in a frosty moonlight.

  Marsh stiffened his shoulders, and stood more on his heels than his toes. "I was never one for makin' after help in troublethat is fightin' trouble."

  John continued to study him. "You look like you might be in trouble nowor mebbe drinkin' from th' shine of your eyes.Speak up, these men are my neighbors. I've been with 'em all my life."

  "I'm dead sober, butpleaseI'd take it as a favor if you'd step outside a minute.That is if you're not afraid."

  "I don't know what you're drivin' at, but least way it'll do no harm, since you ask me civil like," John said, and got up and came and knocked his pipe against the stove hearth.

  In the room of silent, watching men, the sound was like a loud clanging. Marsh jerked his head in a startled way, and the Ragan boy laughed and said in a low voice, but loud enough for him to hear, "Whatever th' oil man's business is, it's a makin' him nervous."

  Marsh glanced back and saw Young Willie watching him, and then Mrs. Crouch twitching at the curtain and following him with her eyes. He opened the door, and John inclined his head slightly and said, "After you, Sir."

  He led the way to the end of the porch and down the steps, but John halted on the top step and said, "Whatever your business is, it can't be so private but that this is far enough to go.Well?"

  Marsh struck the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, looked first at the ground, then up at John. "It'sit's about Delph."

  John's Adam's apple jumped as if it had a will of its own, and his eyes lost their look of fixed calm. "Delph?"

  "Yes."

  "Why in thunder would you be talkin' to me about Delph?You wantin' to come courtin' her one a these days. Is that what you're after?"

  "N-o-o. Yes. I meanI mean I'm askin' for her."

  "Askin' for her?" John's pipe clattered to the floor, but he did not stoop to pick it up.

  Marsh nodded. "Yes. I mean to marry her."

  "Youyou mean you're standin' there askin' me to let you marry Delph? Whywhy you hardly know th' child."

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  "I know her better than you think."

  There were four steps to the ground and John covered them in a stride. "Whatwhat you mean you know her?"

  Marsh slanted his hat to the bridge of his nose, and looked at the top button of John's shirt. John stood six feet three, and he'd be damned if he'd crane his head to look into his eyes. "What I say. I'd like to marry her. I thought I'd ask you decent like an' civil."

  "Decent like an' civilyouyou good for nothin' trollopin' jack assyouyou don't know th' meanin' of such words."

  "I'm civil else I'd knock you downnow."

  "You'll mebbe knock me downI'm not sayin' you couldn'tyou've got a chest like a rock breakin' convict'sbut by God get this straightI'll be th' last man you'll ever knock down. Civil? Does a man come askin' for a woman like a youngen out to bag a sack a meal. You could ha come to my house, like a honest man, dressed decent, stead a comin' in your filthy oil clothes, callin' me out from th' store an' talkin' such matters over in th' road. If it's jokin' you be, it's a poor joke."

  "I never make jokes."

  "More's th' pity. It's Delph I'm thinkin' on. I know she's full a foolish notions, but she shorely didn't put this in your head."

  "I can't say that she did," Marsh answered, and waited. When John said nothing more and seemed ready to turn away, he went on. "I'd like your answer."

  "You fool, you know what th' answer'ull be. I'd rather see her stretched dead in her coffin than married to th' likes a you, a man she don't know. You've mebbe got half a dozen wives for all I know. Not a roof to take her to, no job eitherfrom what I've heared."

  Marsh tried to keep his tongue civil in spite of the hot blood pounding in his ears. "I can get a job long as oil comes out a th' ground.An' I've got money saved. Not so much as I'd oughtbut more'n most."

  "Money?" John spat the word in his face. "Money in th' bank never yet kept a man from bein' low down white trash. You can't buy her a decent name, or a place in th' world. You can't give her a thing she's not got already."

  "I've seen better satisfied."

  John snorted. "She's got a mind like a April wind. It's not been three months since she was dykin' herself out for Logan, then she

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  was beggin' to go to school. Now, she thinks she maybe wants to marry you, an' spend her days gallivantin' over th' country or livin' in some tin roofed oil shanty."

  "She'll not spend her days like that. I'll"

  "You don't know what you'll do. You'll have to go where a job takes you. An' one thing's certain. You'll never settle down. It's not in th
' likes a you.An' another thing isI'd cut my tongue out 'fore I'd give my leave to this."

  "That's all I wanted to know."

  John took a step backward, looked straight into Marsh's eyes, and emphasized his words with short hard strokes of his hand. "Recollect, I've got th' say over her 'til she's twenty-one. An' if I see hide or hair a you about my place there'll be trouble. Recollect?"

  "I'll recollect," Marsh said, and turned and walked rapidly toward Jude. He looked down, and saw his clenched hands, the knuckles blue and the fingers blue white. He stopped suddenly, torn by a hot wish to run back, knock John Costello down, choke him, break his nose, and blacken his eyes. An oil man with maybe half a dozen wives, and he'd never settle down.

  He sprang on Jude, and the big horse, mettlesome from standing in the cold, swung away in a hard gallop. He heard the planks of the bridge ring under the horse's feet, and knew he was going to see Delph, John or no John. He wondered if he were riding in the wrong or right direction. He looked back once and saw a crowd on the porch, centered about John who stood stiff and straight like a man cut in stone with his eyes bright blue and burning in a face bleached with anger. "You'd never catch up on a mule," he heard Young Willie say, and he thought there was satisfaction in Young Willie's voice. He saw Mrs. Crouch in the door gaping after him. She looked immensely tall and wide as she stood on the sill higher than the porch. She smiled over the heads of the men, and made a shooing motion with her blue checked apron, as if he were some stray chicken to be hurried out of danger.

  He rode on then, and did not stop to see if any followed. Jude's breath came in gasping heaves when they stopped at last by Costello's barnyard gate. Juber saw him and came quickly from the barn hall, and opened the gate and looked at him with troubled eyes. "I see you've asked," he said. "You're too quick like an' triggery to

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  ever get along with people. You had ought to a handled John like a gun shy dawg, 'stead a that you must go bustin' down soon's you finished your work, I reckin."

  Marsh dismounted and led the overly hot Jude to the shelter of the barn. "Mebbe John was civil when I talked to him," he said.

  Juber shook his head. "Aye, God I can see th' treatment he give ye. It's writ plain on your mouth, an' your eyes black as coals. You come ridin' like a wild man with your chin all stuck out.Delph's gone to hunt th' cows right now, an' to my mind you'd better speak a word with her an' let your horse rest a bit, an' then be gittin' out a this countryfer a spell at least."

  Marsh turned away to go for Delph, but Juber halted him. "You'd better wait right here in th' barn," he said. "They can see ye on the hill from th' house. If she don't come pretty quick, I'll call her," he promised, and handed Marsh a grass sack to rub the mud and creek water from Jude. The old man went away, and except for Jude's breathing the great barn was still. Outside, the early autumn twilight was coming down in a slow gathering darkness like blue gray smoke dropping unseen out of the sky. High up in the pasture he heard the cow bells, and then Delph's calling, " S-u-u-uke, Bessie, s-u-u-uke," in high long notes, that rose and rose like birds crying above the hills.

  Bessie must have heard and come for the call was not repeated. He watched through the wide barn door and saw soon the cows, and then Delph with a long switch in her hand walking behind. She stopped at the highest spot on the hill, and stood with head lifted and searching as if she hunted in the sky. The cows reached the barn lane, and began an impatient jangling of their bells, and still she stood, straight and sharp and dark, like a thing rooted in the ground and growing up against the sky.

  Juber called her at last. Marsh saw the startled movement of her body, and wondered if the thoughts and dreams that held her so had been centered about him or the bright heaven built on poetry and women's magazines she called the world.

  She ran down the hill and opened the pasture gate. The cows and yearlings pushed impatiently through, but it was not until she had closed the gate and given the always lagging Bessie a light cut with her switch, that she saw him impatiently hiding in the doorway of the barn. She dropped the switch and ran to him past the ambling

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  cows. "I never thought you'd come so soon," she said, and caught his outstretched hands.

  "Your uncle almost got me down," he whispered, and tried to smile.

  "I was worried," she answered, and when he looked at her he knew her thoughts on the hill had been for him. Maybe it was because her cheeks were red from the cold or because of the dusky light in the barn hall, but her eyes seemed brighter, a burning blue like a high October sky at noon; eyes that would never be afraid.

  "John will mebbe try to make you change your mind," he warned.

  She smiled at his foolish doubting ways. "He'd have to kill me first," she said, and flung up her head. She was silent a moment with her smile slowly fading. She buttoned and unbuttoned the leather strap on his jacket cuff. "It won't be easy this winter.I mean with you gone."

  "What a you mean this winter with me gone?"

  She glanced up, startled by the impatience of his tone. "You'll have to go awayat least a little piece. Maybemaybe." She couldn't talk when she thought of his going away.

  She felt the worn leather of his jacket hard and cold against her face, and his hands tight about her shoulders. "Listen, Delph. I'm no good at waitin' II've got to be certain, Delph. I can't go away with things like this. Your uncle so set against me that he'll maybe"

  Juber called from the other end of the hall, "Lord, Marsh, please get goin' I think that's John's mule comin' up th' hill now."

  "Delph, I can't leave you here with nothin' certain. An' Logan Ragan, they want you back with him."

  She sighed at his inability to understand. "But we're engaged.I couldn't have anything to do with Logan when I said I'd marry you. Wewe can't just pick up an' go. Uncle John he'd."

  "He couldn't do anything. We'd not be around to know. I don't want to wait an' go away never knowin'. Come on an' bring nothin' but th' clothes on your back."

  "Now?" she asked, with a sharp excited breath, and was ready to gallop away behind him on Jude.

  He hesitated. "I'll set a day to meet you, an' know first where I'm takin' you."

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  "Lord, Lord, you two. Save your huggin' an' bussin' till some more fittin' time. I can see him a comin' up th' hill."

  Delph stirred in his arms, and wished he would take hernow, but Marsh stroked her hair and seemed to ponder. "I'll writelet you know in a week or so. Mrs. Crouch she'll."

  "He's a stoppin' at th' front gate now. He'll be a callin' Delph, or a comin' out with a shot gun. Fer God sakes, man, git goin'."

  "You'd better go," she whispered. She clung to him a moment, then pushed him away, but held him with her eyes and asked, "But where will you beif"

  He backed slowly toward the stable door. "You mean you'll meet me when I say."

  She nodded, but he continued to look at her a moment longer. She saw worship in his eyes, and hunger, too, and something else that made her think of Logan and his too-possessive ways. Then he was gone, and there was no place in her mind for thought of Logan. She wanted to run after him and learn where he would be, but he was on Jude and galloping away with no looking back. She stood still with her back against a stable door and tried to think. Juber came and shoved a milk bucket into her hand. "Be a doin' somethin', be a milkin'. If he don't start callin' you. He'll be comin'."