Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Katy remembered her duties as hostess and led the way to the house, but stopped on the porch steps to listen again to Solomon's bellows from the barn. Caesar listened, too, and pricked his ears and growled low in this throat while the hairs on his neck rose like quills. "I guess it's a good thing we're givin' him to Marsh," Katie said. "No farm would ever be big enough for him an' Solomon."

  "Marsh can't take a dog to South America," Delph pointed out, then sneezed, and Katy for the first time seemed to notice the cold. She hurried Delph into the front hall, considered a moment by the parlor door, and at last decided to take her there. The room, though large and high ceilinged, filled with finer furniture and rugs than any Delph had ever seen, was disappointing. In spite of the piano, the books, and electric lamps, it was much the same as the parlor at home. There was the same air of a thing carefully kept and little used, and the large old-fashioned pictures of people, now dead, might have been kinsmen of the dead that looked down from Fronie's parlor walls.

  However, there were other pictures, in smaller, newer frames, scattered here and there over the piano and the tables. They were Katy's brothers and sisters, Delph knew, though it was hard to think that Katy in a serge skirt torn in spots and pricked with cockle burrs, a denim jumper and brass buckled boots, could be one of that group.

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  She sat now on the edge of her chair, and was silent until Delph, glancing at a picture in a fine silver frame, said, "That looks like your brother Sam."

  "It is," Katy answered, and got up and brought the picture for her to see.

  Delph studied it a time then said, "He looks like you."

  "Mama says he's better lookin' though. His eyes are bluer, an' his ears are not so big as mine'll be."

  Delph looked at Katy in some surprise. "Didn't you ever see him?"

  Katy studied the toe of one shoe. "He never comes home like th' otherseight years it'll be this spring, an' I was five years old."

  "I guess you get anxious to see him sometimes."

  Katy pondered over the picture. "I don't know, In a wayhe wouldn't be like my brother. Th' others changesomean' they visit home a good bit an' are not so far away. I don't guess he'd hardly talk th' same."

  "I know your mother's proud," she said, and sat a moment smiling at the picture, then both she and Katy jumped when Dorie's voice thundered in the hall, "Katy, whatever do you mean bringin' somebody same as a member of th' family into this cold graveyard of a parlor, an' lettin' her sit with her coat on. You might as well a left her standin' on th' porch."

  "But, Mama, you had me build a fire. I thought it was for Delph."

  "Katy, you get less sense ever' day of your life. That new preacher over in Burdine told Brother Eli he was aimin' to visit me today, tryin' to get up money for th' heathen, like as if we don't have enough needy right here, an' I thought if I put him in this parlor he'd cut his stay short, unless he's part Eskimo." Dorie strode into the room, pushed back the man's brown felt hat she wore, and after a moment's smiling appraisal of Delph, wrung her hand vigorously. "Well, I see you got here with no mishap."

  "It was nice of you to let us stop over with you, an' I hope we won't be causin' you."

  "Pshaw, why my grandfather thought nothin' a stoppin' at your granpa Costello's for a week at a time, an' I know nobody offered him a cave of a room like this when he was tired an' cold th' way you must be. But come on, I'll soon thaw you out in th' kitchen."

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  "Aw, Mama," Katy wailed, "don't let's take her thereit's an awful place to take a young bride with maybe good resolutions about housekeepin' I'll take her to her own room. It's nice an' warm," Katy continued, and without waiting for her mother's answer hurried to the foot of the stairs.

  "Don't be stayin' all night. Supper's ready all but gettin' it on th' table, an' if th' kitchen's straightened you'll be th' Miss to straighten it."

  "There's Bull Durham sacks an' books an' barn junk like calf halters all over it," Katy giggled when they had reached the top of the stairs. "Anyhow, I wanted you to see your roomit used to be Ethel's; she's married now an' lives in Detroit. She liked it, an' I thought you would, too, better than th' others. You can see over th' Big North Fork to Burdine, an' sometimes th' lights are kind a nice when it snows. From what Mama an' Marsh have said of you I thought you'd like th' lights."

  Delph scarcely glanced at the room furnished in familiar black walnut and wild cherry, and warmed by a coal fire in a gray marble fireplace, but walked with Katy to the window. Katy drew back the curtain, and they stood together and looked down at Burdine, now no more than strings and clusters of lights scattered over the valley and the steep sides of the triangular hill that rose back from the spot where the Big North Fork joined the Cumberland. Delph, in spite of the cold, opened the window and leaned far out, and studied the town. "It's th' most lights I ever saw at once," she hesitantly explained when she had remembered her manners and closed the window.

  Katy talked, pointed out this and that, so that Delph saw the town, fine and alive, covered by the darkness and colored with Katy's talk. The lights that were bright and low down near the rivers, they belonged to the lumber mills. Higher up were the stores and a few dwelling houses, then the lights that winked red and green they were signals by the railroad tracks, and the two real bright ones they were by the depot. Past those and higher the lights were scattered and less bright. That was the part of the town where the most of the people lived. The churches were up there, and so was the school. The best people lived on High Street, but mostly they were old and their children gone away. That and a few others were pretty streets, but down in the bottoms and by the river it was awful, the

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  white trash, shanty people, and bad women lived there. Katy whispered the information about the bad women, then turned away to fix the fire. But Delph stayed by the window, asking about this light and that, and had the excitement of seeing a train, all alive with light, the engine wreathed in rose colored smoke, come flying out of the tunnel and across the high bridge, a passenger train with rows of twinkling, flashing windows. She hoped it would stop, but it went on, flying around a curve she could not see.

  "That's number eight, th' Florida Belle," Katy explained. "Trains like that never stop in Burdine, anymore. But they used to when it was a boom town an' before th' road was made an' th' big busses didn't go through here.Don't you want to come an' rest awhile?" she suggested after a time of looking at Delph's back, bent forward with eagerness to see things not shown by the lights.

  Delph turned slowly away from the window. "It makes me think of a Christmas treeone lit up with electric lights like I saw once in Town." She flushed suddenly, and looked into the fire. "I guess you think I'm silly carryin' on so over a few lightsbut, wellyou see I've stayed pretty close in th' back hillsuntil nowan' my county didn't even have a railroad."

  Katy smiled in understanding. "Even Ethel when she comes home from Detroit she'll stand an' look at th' Burdine lights. 'I'll never see any that'll look half so fine as they used to look,' she'll say.Maybe I'll stay home from school tomorrow, an' I'll take you down to Burdine. It's ugly as can be by daylight, though; they never did build th' bottoms back after th' 1913 flood. But maybe sometime we'll go in th' truck to Hawthornethat's our county seatan' it's lots bigger than this with railroad shops an' a refinery an' roundhouse an' lots of stores."

  "I don't guess Iwe'll be here long enough for that, but it would be nice to go."

  Katy looked at her in some surprise. "Didn't Marsh tell you? He's not leavin' 'til sometime in January an' you all will be with us 'til then." She hugged her knees excitedly. "Mama says I'm already more excited over th' weddin' than if I was th' bride, but neither one of my sisters was married at home, an' you'll be takin' their place somehow.I hope we get th' tobacco off a hand right quick, so you can have your weddin' soon."

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  Delph sat with her eyes fixed steadfastly on the ashes in the grate. It was not easy to keep Katy from le
arning that all these plans were new to herand disappointing.

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  8

  The west wind shifted more south than north, so that by morning there was damp heavy snow, and by noon time rain. The rain continued, a warm rain that made Dorie's fields of rye green as April, and in the damp air the tobacco was soft and springy to the touch, fine for stripping. Marsh stood hour after hour, stripping and grading with Perce Higginbottom, a red-faced, leather-necked giant of a farmer from Cedar Stump over the Cumberland. Sometimes Dorie or Katy came to help; now and then Delph stood around and watched, for she knew nothing of tobacco and Dorie would not risk a green hand.

  Most often, however, the men worked alone. Sometimes there would be talk; Angus would say a few words concerning Dorie's crops or hogs or children, and Perce too, talked of land, and crops, roads, and county politics, but mostly of his wife Lizzie, whom he was fond of quoting, and of his four boys and a girl, "Th' spittin' image of her maw." But usually there would be long whiles of silence, broken only by the rain on the high roof shingles and the gentle rasping sound of tobacco leaf being torn from tobacco stalk. Now and again one of the three would hold up a leaf, smooth and flatten it between his palms and say, "As pretty a long bright red as ever I stripped," or "Look how light this lug leaf cured, an' thinner than silk," or some such like. Marsh listened and commented most often with his eyes alone.

  Many times when the barn doors were open and he could see out and away through the thin white walls of rain, Angus or Perce might talk and he would hardly hear them, and work half conscious of the

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  bright crumpled silk of the tobacco leaves in his hands. The back doors of the tobacco barn opened on a wide view of a field in winter. At one side of the field was a great brick house, white porched, many chimneyed, green shuttered, larger than Dorie's house, and rented now to Mr. Elliot, northern owner of the Burdine lumber mills.

  Sometimes Marsh, after a time of looking at the land across the river, would say to his fellow workers in a halting apologetic way, "I think I need a bit of air not so tobaccery," and they would nod and maybe look after him while he went across the barnyard to stand by Dorie's back fence.

  The wire fence marked the boundaries of upper Fairchild Place. The earth fell away in a stretch of steep, fern-covered rocky hill side that dropped down two or three hundred feet to the acres of flat river bottom corn land, the richest part of Costello's Place. Marsh could, when he leaned on the fence, look down and see Dorie's fields, see two small white-painted renters' houses near great barns where cows and fat chickens and fatter hogs ambled about and seemed to feed all the day long on hay and fodder and corn.

  He would pause to smile briefly on Dorie's side of the river, then his eyes would go walking on, through a band of willows, over clumps of white limbed sycamores to the bottom lands that lay below the brick house and were a part of the old Weaver Place. The old farm was a world unto itself, a half moon of rich bottom corn land, hills and rolling fields above for pasture land, all bound by a river, a river bluff, and a creek on the other side of the river hill. Marsh had never seen the whole of the place except once seven years before, but he knew it well; had seen it many times through Dorie's eyes, and had listened to Roan's lament that it was another bit of good farming land being wasted by weather and careless renters.

  Seven years ago Dorie had wanted to buy it, but her children objected, all except Katy, six years old, who had wanted to sit on the back porch with the field glasses all the day long and supervise the running of the new farm. He remembered the talk the Fairchild children who were home had had, hours of it, then Dorie's sorrow when the bank took it over and no real farmer ever came to buy it. There was that Sunday morning, he had been almost a stranger to Dorie then, when she had come with Katy to his boarding place, and asked him to set her over the river. She didn't want her own boys to know,

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  she had said. They had slipped away like thieves, broken the lock on Poke Easy's skiff, for Dorie in her excitement had forgotten the key, and gone over the river and explored the farm. It was early April and on the river hill above the corn land the dogwood and redbud were in bloom, and the lilac flowers in the brick house yard had hung heavy and fragrant and sweet. All that was seven years ago. Land was high then, but money was cheap; land was cheap now, but money was high, hard to come by.

  His eyes would travel slowly over this and that, the renter's house in the bottoms, a square gray ugly building it looked to be of six or seven rooms, porchless and paint peeling, standing bleak and ugly in a grassless, fenced yard. He could see a smoke house, chicken house, and tool house, and the door of the stone spring house under the hill. He remembered the spring cool, with moss covered walls and mint and blue-eyed water grass growing by its door. But everything was old and poorly kept, lost in the half moon shaped stretch of corn land, dwarfed by the great barn, larger than Dorie's cattle barn.

  The fields ended at the foot of a steep river bluff, sheer crags of blue white limestone in spots, in others steep walls of ground where stunted cedar trees, mock orange bush and all manner of things grew. He would follow the rutted red clay road that twisted steeply up the less craggy portion of the hill, then led between the unkept orchard and the poorly tended pasture fields to the paved road to Hawthorne Town. He could not see where the farm road met the highway, nor the rough land past the pasture hill as it dropped down to the creek on the other side. He knew they were there, just as he knew that in the pasture there were wide acres of gently rolling land, limestone soil that would grow clover hay or rye or wheat or corn, if need be. He knew that in the orchard there were tall old pear trees and thick-trunked, crooked-limbed apple trees; Ben Davis, Winesap, and Horse apple, Early June, Golden Delicious, Limber Twigs, and Rusty Coats. Just above the banks of the creek he could not see there was a grove of sugar maple trees, some oak and beech and shag bark hickory, thickets of wild plum near the pasture, and over many trees the thick, rope-like vines of wild grapes grew.

  The uncut fence rows were worlds unto themselves, jungles of sumac bush and blackberry briars, sassafras shoots and red haw

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  bush with its thorn-like twigs. There were persimmons in the pasture, a grove of the small, deep-orange, sweet-meated kind near a clump of black walnut and butternut trees. The back boundary of the land followed a shallow stream, falling over wide ledges of limestone where watermoss and mint grew and periwinkle shells twinkled in the sun, or again caught into shadowy pools thick with minnows. The path of the creek turned and steepened into a series of cascades that carried the water soon to the river, and where the creek water touched the river the farm ended.

  Marsh would stand for long moments with his fingers pulling and bending the tight squares of wire, his mind never knowing what his fingers did. Sometimes white fog would blanket the bottom lands and he could see no more than the comb of the barn or tip of the renter's house chimney, but the fog never hindered his slow searching glance nor covered the things he saw. Back in the barn, Angus and Perce would look at him, study his strong straight back, and the way he stood, squarely on his two feet with no laziness and no lounging. Perce might say as if to the air, "He'd make a good neighbor," and half an hour later Angus as he tied a hand might answer, "Pity he's got to go off to South Americago livin' by day's work in strange places."

  Dorie, as well as Angus and Perce, saw Marsh sometimes as he stood in the rain and looked over the Cumberland. One afternoon when the tobacco was mostly stripped, and the rain was more fog-like mist than drops of water, she called to him from the back porch, "What are you huntin' for over th' river, Marsh?"

  "There's no huntin' to it," he called back without looking at her.

  She threw a jumper over her shoulders and came and stood with him by the fence. "You ought to go over there one a these days, Marsh," she said, and glanced speculatively at him from the corners of her eyes. When Marsh remained silent she continued after a long survey of the farm, "T
hat place is a cryin' for somebody to get it in shape."