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ironed and made fit to wear. He and Delph had been mighty lucky; it didn't look as if the flood had washed much of their stuff away, just wetted and muddied it, and that of course could be remedied. If he didn't want to leave off to come eat his dinner she'd send one of the boys with it; her cooking wasn't maybe so good as Delph's, for she had heard that Delph came of a breed of good cooks, but maybe he could put up with it for a few weeks until he had the house fixed to live in and Delph was up and about.
And Marsh turned short about and walked away; he wanted to go down and look at the river, he said. He was glad he wasn't a woman; he thought he might have cried. However, he would have had no opportunity. Mrs. Elliot came calling and chattering behind him. She had just remembered that in the brick house attic there were some odds and ends of furniture that had been in the house when they moved there. There would maybe be something he could use.
He continued to live with Perce during the weeks that his house remained wet and furniturelsss while Delph lay in the brick house and seemed to wander in a shadowy land that was neither life nor death. He went to her noon and night and morning, and always the time it took on the back porch to clean the mud from his shoes seemed long. He wanted to race up the stairs and into her room and see if maybe this once, she would be Delph again, at least in her eyes. Dr. Andy had cured her of her sickness, but it seemed that no one could bring her back to life. Her eyes from bright blue seemed changed to gray, a dull gray with no light and no shadow.
When Marsh called she never asked but the one question, and of late asked that in a low hopeless voice with no lifting of her eyes, ''Don't you think th' baby's lookin' better?''
And Marsh would answer in loud tones that always rang with an empty sound, no matter how hard he tried to lie, "Sure, he's lookin' fine. He's a layin' a suckin' his thumb now."
"If I could a had milk for him like I oughthewell he wouldn't a started off so slow," she would say, and fall into a lifeless silence that seemed less that of a woman keeping still than of a woman gone.
Sometimes he tried to comfort her, would pat her hand or smooth her hair and say, "It's not your fault, Delph. Mine for goin' away. You can't help it if we can't find anything that'll suit him. God knows you've done your part."
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"Havin' him an' then lettin' him starve to death," she would answer, and lie staring at the wall.
Now and then Marsh tried to pierce the blankness in her eyes with slow worded accounts of this or that. "Delph, you ought to see Ebonyshines like a piece a new mined coal. An' th' way he can throw up his heels," or, "Delph, I found a pussy willow in bloom by th' river.Th' buds are swellin' on th' apple trees.Delph, you'll hardly know th' house. We're mendin' th' chimney an' fixin' a new under pinnin'."
But Delph never answered him, and only shivered and turned to the wall when he spoke of the house. Many nights he tip-toed away, and never knew if she lay awake or asleep. He always stopped in Mrs. Elliot's room and looked at the child, bedded in a low basket on a couch. But the child, no more than Delph, gave any sign that it knew or cared for him.
"It's going to be such a pretty baby," Mrs. Elliot would say, and smile at him. At first there had been a hunger like an envy in her eyes when she smiled, but now there was nothing but pity and sorrow. More and more it seemed to Marsh that she hesitated when he asked to see his son. Such a little thing it was to hurt a man so, to make his heart and his hands and all his strength useless and of no account because they could not make it eat or grow.
At first he had taken the pillow in his arms, had hefted it, proud to feel the weight of his son, but lately he left it in the basket. The pillow grew lighter instead of heavier, and the face that twisted sometimes into a grimace of crying grew smaller, and made Marsh think of some little toothless old man. The baby cried a lot, a thin hungry cry, too weak to carry past the house, but all the same Marsh heard it, especially at night when he sat a time after supper with Perce and Lizzie and their children. Perce had six strong healthy children, and he couldn't have one.
One day late in February about the time of sundown when he was finishing his barnwork, for his stock was home now, he heard the rattle and creak of a heavily loaded wagon on the river hill. He went down the lane to see who it could be and what load they brought this time of day. The big clay colored mules and the heavy jolt wagon were familiar, and when a little man pulled off his hat and waved it, he knew that Juber had come with John's wagon and team from the Little South Fork Country.
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Marsh forgot that Ivy's calf would strip her dry, and hurried to open the barn lane gate, then rushed up the hill to meet the wagon. "Delph'ull be tickled to death you've come," he called while still a few feet away.
Juber kept his eyes on the wagon tongue while he answered, "I've already seen her."
"I'll bet she was glad."
"She give no sign."
Marsh walked on by the wagon with all the gladness gone from his eyes. He wanted to ask Juber if he had seen the baby, but somehow could not. He saw the old man's fiddle case, carefully wrapped in a saddle blanket and packed on the wagon seat. "I know she'll be glad to hear a fiddle tune. Last winter now an' agin she'd speak a you an'." He glanced hopefully at Juber, then stopped. There were tears in the old man's eyes.
Juber continued down the hill and after a time cleared his throat and talked of the ones in the Little South Fork Country. Mrs. Crouch, the Hedricks, and Fronie had sent letters by him to Delph, while John had sent this wagonload of Delph's rightful belongings. John had acted up a sight when Delph ran away, got down the family Bible and threatened to blot out her name, but Fronie wouldn't let him. God worked in strange ways, she said, and maybe God had sent the oil man to tame and keep Delph straight. Juber was silent for a moment with his eyes wandering out over the fields, up past Dorie's river hill and then into the sky. "I reckin he did," he said, but whether he spoke to the sky or to Marsh it was hard to say.
All along he'd hardly ever heard them mention Delph, he went on to say when he had driven into the barn and stopped his team. John would sometimes grunt and say that no wandering oil man could ever settle down and farm, and Fronie would sigh and declare Delph would never let a man of hers spend his days in a river valley. But now and then word had come of how Marsh was making out; Fronie and John would listen and look pleased, he thought, but never say a word.
The Hedricks were the first to hear of the flood; news came over their radio of how bad it was on the Cumberland, and Sil Hedrick had come knocking in the night to bring the news. Fronie had divided her time between praying and crying while John had walked about like
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a wooden soldier. Juber had gone to the barn to comfort himself with a fiddle tune, and in the crib he had stumbled over John on his knees in the dark. He'd had to laugh at John. He had jumped to his feet all in a fluster at being disturbed, then turned on Juber with an oath and said, "Blood's blood, by God, if she did run away."
Next day word came from Dorie by telephone and messenger, and later on she had written them of Delph's sickness, the baby, and the wreck the flood had brought to the lower farm. All had been certain then that Marsh would never stick. But tales had come, the way tales travel in the hillsswiftly and easily as smoke on the windof Marsh's work of rebuilding. It was John then who suggested one night at supper that they get together a load of Delph's rightful things and send them down.
Marsh looked at the heaped wagon, and his jaw tightened as he thought of John and the hard words he had given him. "I've got neighborsan' my credit's good. I'm wantin' no help from th' Little South Fork Country,"
"You needn't be bull headed.Delph, mebbe might like to have her things. You might think a her once in a while," Juber advised with a surliness unusual with him, and started the wagon toward the house.
Marsh followed in silence, ashamed of his unneighborly ways. Juber looked tired and old with all the heart gone out of his eyes. "You rest an' I'll do th' unload
in'," he insisted, but Juber shook his head, and shouldered one of the two feather beds stuffed in the back of the wagon.
Marsh marveled at the wagon load. There seemed no end to the quilts and pillows and linens that he and Juber carried and stacked in the empty dining room. Many times Juber paused over this or that and explained its history. That blue and white checked thing like a quilt was a coverlid Delph's great-great granma had woven nigh onto a hundred years ago, and that silk crazy quilt she'd got when she was a little girl from a great-aunt in Texas, but the red cedar, copper bound water bucket had been made in the Little South Fork Country, and the long heavy muzzle loader with the hand hewn, silver mounted black walnut stock had come from Virginia and was a "keep sake" from her mother's side of the family.
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But Juber fell abruptly silent when he uncovered a small, low rockered trundle bed, made of wild black cherry, its diminutive head and foot boards carved with finely traced pine cones and sheaves of pine. Marsh picked up the small old thing, and smoothed the plump feather tick it contained, but did not touch the baby's things some one had put under the tick. "Take it on in. You'll be needin' it one of these daysmebbe," Juber said in a rough loud voice, and began tugging at Delph's old dresser, the only other piece of furniture he had brought.
Full dark came before they had emptied the wagon, for Juber talked long and lovingly over the last of the loadtwo bushel baskets of roots and shoots of herbs and blooming things taken from the yards and gardens of the Little South Fork Country. "I wish Delph could see all this," Marsh said more times than one, and even Juber smiled and seemed less forsaken when he took packets of flower seed tied in mail order catalogue leaves from his overall pockets, and talked of Delph's love of flowers.
Still, he showed no eagerness to see her again that night. When his mules were stabled and fed, and they were going into Elliot's yard, Juber hung back at the kitchen porch. "I'll see her agin in th' mornin'," he said, and, too timid to go into the kitchen, rested on the porch while Marsh went up to Delph alone.
He heard the baby's cry, weaker it seemed than at noon. He thought of the seed he would plant and the roots of living things he would put into the ground. They would grow while his child shriveled and died like some small water-loving plant on a dry hill side. Delph lay propped on pillows and watched a low fire flicker in the grate. In the uncertain light her forehead and cheek bones and chin glimmered sharp and white, but her mouth and eyes were dark shadows where nothing seemed to live. Marsh closed the door, careful to make no noise, and called softly, "Delph."
The face moved a little, and her voice came, tired, but with a touch of her old anger through the tiredness. "That you, Marsh?Whathow did Juber like th' looks of th' baby?"
"Fine," he said, and came and sat on the edge of the bed. He tried to tell her of all that Juber had brought, and of the flowers that would grow in their yard next year. But it was hard to talk when Delph gave no sign she heard. He had a moment's terror that maybe
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he would lose her, too, when the babydidn't cry any more. And then he felt that unreasoning certainty that she couldn't die. The quick-blooded, bright-eyed Delph he had married wouldn't simply lie down in a room and die.
"Any of the neighbors come today?" he asked, unable to go away until she had talked a bit, said something he could remember and think over until he saw her again.
"You know they're always comin'," she answered, and added with something of her usual spirit, "I wish they'd all stay at home."
"Pshaw, Delph, they mean no harm, always tryin' to think of somethin' nice for you to eat or askin' about th' baby."
"It's my baby, not theirs' an' to hear that Sadie Huffacre talk you'd think I didn't care ifif." Her voice trembled and hesitated then went on in a cautious whisper. "She kept a sayin' she'd raised six of her own an' never lost onebut they'd all been dead if she'd fussed an' fretted an' bothered like Mrs. Elliot doesan', Marsh, Mrs. Elliot loves him so. She's tryin'."
"Don't pay that old gossip no mind, Delph."
She moved her head impatiently. "An' Dorie, she's no better. She was here today sayin'sayin' I'd got to get some backbonean' face thingsan' get. She told me how she lost oneit was punylike minean'it just couldn't live."
Marsh put his hand on her thin soft shoulder. "Delph, listen, you've got plenty backbonedon't let anybody tell you different.An' anyhow mebbeyou can't ever tell. Recollect my corn last summer, how it nearly died an' then when it rained."
But Delph was crying, weak, heart-broken sobs. She raised suddenly on one elbow with hatred and accusation and rebellion fighting through her eyes. "It's not right, Marsh, an' fair. Nothin' can make me say like some, 'It's th' way it had to be,' an' fifty years from now I can't sit back like Dorie an' call it, 'Th' one I lost.' To go through all thatan' think on it so before it was bornsee it somehow. An' then have itdie. An' all th' time you lay a thinkin' you'd go through that much an' more all over if it would help. Somethin', somebody could save it."
Her voice had grown gradually louder and wilder until it rang through the house and brought Vinie and Mrs. Elliot. They soothed and smiled and hoped, declared the baby was looking better, while
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Marsh sat feeling helpless and clumsy, and Delph looked at them all with hot angry eyes, more rebellious than sorrowful. Though Delph said nothing more, Marsh went down to Juber with her hard, angry sobs ringing in his head.
When Delph was left alone at last and after failing to eat as much of her supper as she should, she lay and listened to the baby's crying in the next room, a hungry cry that goaded her into a wild anger at her useless, spineless ways. She could never hope to have milk for her child, Dr. Andy had said, unless she ate, and she couldn't eat. Too weak to do more than let tears trickle down the corners of her eyes, she lay and listened until Mrs. Elliot carried it to another part of the house.
She saw the bundle of letters and such that Juber had brought, but letters mattered little now. They wouldn't do the baby any good. For lack of anything better to do, she opened the package and saw first her old scrap book, and there was Sam smiling his strange mocking smile. She flung the book away; her baby might one day have gone as far as Sam. There were odds and ends of other things; old letters, a bank book, and other documents she had never seen. She saw Fronie's slanting school-teacherish script, and felt an unexpected rush of eagerness to hear from Fronie; no woman in the Little South Fork Country had ever had better luck with babies.
She tore the letter open, glanced briefly through the long beginning, talk of weather, and church, and hope for Delph's soul. She raced to the bottom of the third or fourth page, found the word "baby" glanced back and read. "... I have thought it over. There can't be anything bad wrong with your baby. It must have good blood on both sides or it would be dead after what you and it went through. I am not blaming you. But I guess before it was born you didn't take care of yourself like a woman ought. But what is done is done. And now I will have my say. Delph, it is going against God and reason to try to raise a baby on store bought stuff.
"I would not say all this now but because it is my duty and for the sake of John. The baby is his own blood kin like a grandchild you might say. If I had a baby nursing now he would bring me down after it in a minute. But I don't have. Now what you want to do is find a good strong healthy woman, willing to take and nurse it and tend it like her own till it's big enough to wean. If there's a negro woman in
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the neighborhood, half way clean, and willing to take it, she would be more pleasing in the sight of God than all this store bought stuff. Recollect one of your grandmothers and several of your great-aunts were all raised on black women's milk. And on your mother's side in the old days all the babies."
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