Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

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  trousers which he had put on so hastily that he must hold them up with one hand while he tendered the forgotten delphinium with the other. ''I'll wear 'em," he said.

  Marsh stayed upstairs and put on his shoes, and looked at Delph in wonder when a short time later she returned for the overalls. "It's not his fault," she explained. "I've no heart to make him wear 'em. He's heard Az's boys call Mr. Elliot's linen golf knickers 'drawers' That's why he acted up so."

  "You'll have to start spankin' him one a these days. He'll wear his suit now if you say so. I'll see to that."

  But Delph only laughed, "Pshaw, let him wear his overalls. He'll be playin' today anyhow an' gettin' messed up with th' picnic dinner.He'll not always be wearin' such clothes."

  "Sure, he'll change. Soon's he starts goin' with th' girls he'll be spendin' all th' bull calf money he's savin' now on fancy shirts an' ties.It won't be long."

  Delph studied the clothing in her hands, and Marsh wondered how his light talk could have put such a stricken look in her eyes. "I guess he'll be out an' gone before we hardly know it," she said, and measured the length of the overalls against her skirt.

  "But even while he's away in college, he can visit home," Marsh pointed out, but Delph turned away down the stairs and never seemed to hear.

  She combed Burr-Head's hair and thought of other children. At first, in spite of her weakened body and Marsh's wish not to have a larger family immediately, it had seemed sinful and flying in the face of God not to have children when she lived with Marsh as his wife. Now, she wished that she had not in that weak moment of loving spoken of the girl she would like to have. She could never love another child as she loved Burr-Head. She thought of Lizzie and her empty eyes when she talked of her boy that had gone away. "Th' one that left us," Lizzie always said. She was cold and sick a moment, seeing Lizzie's eyes, and then she smiled; Burr-Head would be no common sailor gone for three years. No matter what he did when he finished college he would come home for vacations. They never got too far away for that. There was talk that Sam Fairchild, far away as he was, was expected home sometime this yearmaybe in the fall.

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  Marsh called to know if he couldn't take Burr-Head and the baskets and wait for her by the river. She roused herself, saw the comb in her hand with a few of Burr-Head's twining red brown hairs caught in its teeth. Burr-Head had sickened of his mother's wool gathering ways and slipped away to the yard. There, with his fingers and some rubber bands he trapped bumble bees in the hollyhock flowers. Delph laughed and ran after him and took time to free the bumble bees. After that there was no time to plan on Burr-Head's vacations. Late as it was Burr-Head was not yet given his finishing touches and she had not combed her hair; and how Marsh hated to be late. However, today he did not quarrel, only smiled, called her Sally Thompson who was the slowest woman in the country, and while she braided one side of her hair he braided the other. And after all the rush across the river and up the hill to Fairchild Place they found the whole family including Angus, Dorie's visiting grandchildren, and Minnie Rakestraw, the hired girl who always stayed with them summers, all engaged in a breathless hunt for Dorie's glassesat least one pair. Poke Easy had sickened of his mother's careless ways with her glasses a good while back and so bought her a second pair in case she lost the first; Emma had bought still another pairand now all three were gone. Marsh went to the barn to see a new calf that had come during the night, for he was never any good at finding anything. He saw one of the old jumpers that Dorie wore about the barn hanging on a nail by the stable door, and sticking from a pocket of it were the horn rims of Dorie's glasses. He looked at the calf, then returned to the house; the hero of the day.

  They were of course not late, though they found the church waiting and packed to overflowing; Memorial Day services at Salem would never begin without the Fairchilds, especially when the whole congregation knew that Dorie was home hunting her glasses. Delph went to her place in the choir while Katy and Dorie took the children to the bench where Fairchilds had sat for the last hundred years, held now by three of Perce's boys, sent there by Lizzie who had feared that some strangers might sit there and never know the place was meant for Dorie.

  Since the house was already packed to overflowing, so that by his staying out he would not be setting a bad example for Burr-Head, Marsh went with others of the men to sit on the yew and cedar

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  shrouded stones of the graveyard. He liked it there. The mournful sighing of the great white pines did not sadden him, no more than the myrtle-wreathed stones or wild rose and ivy-covered graves. The old fear of death that had once hounded him was lost.

  When some neighbor died, usually one very old or very young, he would pause in his plowing or whatever work he did, wait until the tolling of the church bells died, and then plow on, untouched by any horror of life and birth and death. When he thought of men dying he thought of grass, the myriad separate blades of it that grew and died with other blades silently taking each vacant place, so that a man walking through the same fields year after year would never know that blades of grass had died. Men in a way were like the grass. They came from the land and to the land they would return; all science and progress and prosperity could not change that, no more than progress and prosperity and laziness and neglect and heedless governments and poverty stricken renters could destroy the land. The land might be impoverished, blown away, or washed in rivers to the sea but some day it would rise again as stone or mud or lie forever as ocean floorwhatever happened the land would endure.

  He leaned against the stone of a man dead eighty years and watched thunder heads froth in the sky and heard without listening the intermittent conversation of Poke Easy and Roan Sandusky and other men gathered there. They mentioned some young boy dead of typhoid fever, and Marsh frowned i¢n thinking of the dead child's careless parents. He made Delph and Burr-Head keep themselves inoculated.

  He wished the men would be silent. He wanted to listen to the singing and the organ music which was pleasant when mixed with the pine trees. Delph had sung one solo and soon she would sing another, and he wanted to hear it with no interruption. Heeft the grave yard and went to stand by a vine covered window where he could see Delph as she sang.

  He had wondered many times of what she thought when she sang, "And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own, and the joy we share as we tarry there." In that as in the other songs she sang in church there was a richness and a mystery that led him to think at times that maybe her mind was less on some pale Christ with wounded hands than a living god of a man

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  who could lead her to all the vague splendors that her life with him would always lack.

  He marveled sometimes that she could please people so, could sing even in the biggest church in Hawthorne Town where there was a pipe organ, and with it all betray no vanity or pride as other women might have done. If praised she would only say, "What woman with half a tongue couldn't sing for her neighbors in some country church or county-seat town?"

  Delph sang on, and the song held him so that he hardly noticed when a car drew up with a soft, scarcely audible purring, and a man got out and came and looked and listened with him by the window. Marsh caught a glimpse of well fitted, white-coated shoulder, and did not waste his time with looking. Some city man, a stranger to the country, had heard Delph's song and noticed the cars about, and stopped to learn what quaint thing the yokels did.

  "That girl, the one singing, is beautiful," the stranger said, and his voice was soft and slow like a hill man's voice, but his words were those of a man who has lived a time in the north or east.

  Marsh nodded, and knew that when the man got into his fine, soft-purring car and drove away, he would carry with him for many a day that picture of Delph. The old dark paneling of the pulpit walls, the Dorothy Perkins roses banked in red masses below her feet, the deep blue of the delphinium and clear yellow of poppies on the Bible
stand above her head, the flickering pattern of light that filtered through the vine latticed window, the rows of upturned listening faces; all were no more than a background for Delph. There was her strong slender, deep-breasted body, the dark glint of a shining braid as she moved her head, the slow lifting and falling of her lashes, and then her eyes, blue and deep and shadowed by many things; the organ music and the roses, some smothered fire of gaiety, some gleam of hunger never satisfied, touched by a bit of sorrow now maybe as if she thought sometimes of the dead for whom she sang. "She is right pretty," Marsh said after a time, and turned then and looked at the stranger, for Delph had finished her song.

  But he could see only his back, the long straight back of a six-foot man, and above the white linen suit his hair was dark, darker than Delph's. He continued to peer and search between the trembling leaves, and he seemed too interested and too eager for a stranger

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  passing by. He found something and for a long moment he did not move his head, and, though it would have been the quivering shadows of the leaves, Marsh thought that his long hands trembled a bit, in the strange uncertain fashion of hands unused to trembling.

  "Tell me," the man said after a time and in a whisper for in the church Brother Eli prayed, "is that one, Katy, there in the end of Dorie Dodson Fairchild's pew?"

  Marsh, too, looked between the leaves "Yes," he said.

  "And the children?"

  "Th' two in kind a fancy clothes, they're Dorie's grandchildren from Detroit, but th' one in overalls with one shoe in his lap an' th' other on th' floor that's Burr-Head, Marsh Gregory's boy."

  "The woman that sang is Delph Gregory, the boy's mother, isn't she?"

  "Yes.How come you know her?"

  "I don't. I just saw her and from the way she sang, I guessed.Where is her husband, Marsh Gregory?"

  "I'm Marsh Gregory."

  "Oh." The man turned and looked at him, and Marsh could hear Delph saying something she had said of another man a long while back, "an' his eyes were blue like corn flowers, an' his hair was blackan' he could see so far."

  But that man was dead a hundred and fifty years, and he had worn deer skin jeans, not tailored white linen. There were hill men and hill men, many tall with black hair and blue eyes, and their eyes deepened like Delph's eyes by black lashes and black brows, and maybe many of them had the same something in their eyes that touched Delph's songs. Then his foolish thoughts were gone; the puzzle finished and he was holding out his hand as the man extended his. "You're Samuel Fairchild, I take it. I've heard a lot about youbut, wellyou don't look much like your brothers."

  Sam nodded and smiled. "People used to say I took after my mother's side of the family. You know, from the back hills near your wife's home."

  "You seem to know all about her," Marsh said, and started back toward the grave yard.

  "That's not strange," Sam said with his easy hill man's smile. "No matter where I am, old Reuben Kidd always manages to hunt

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  me up and send the Westover Bugle. Then, too, for the last three years I've seen a good bit of Emma. She's a great one to describe things and tell all the newsshowed me Delph's picture and Burr-Head's and Solomon's and told meoh, a lot of things."

  Marsh continued silent, but Sam never seemed to notice, and after a moment or so went on to explain that he had intended to wait until fall, but Emma had been asked to take her vacation in late June and early July, and had wanted him to drive her down, for she was no hand at driving.

  "Dorie'll be glad to see you an' Emma," Marsh said, and wished that Sam had not come home. He wished that Delph had not stood alone when she sang.

  The men gathered in the graveyard knew Sam at once and greeted him as if he had gone away only yesterday instead of almost fourteen years. "You've hardly changed," Perce said, and slapped him on the shoulder as he added, "Well, Boy, I'm still waitin' for that good cheap fertilizer an' experiment farm."

  "I might do something in that line yet," Sam said, then looked out over the country. "From the look of things you don't need such things the way you used to."

  "We get along, but there's plenty a room for improvement," Roan said, and smiled with one corner of his mouth and spat with the other. He and Sam had met quite simply, as if there had never been between them either great dreams or great hatreds.

  "Things have changed," Sam went on, and he continued to stand in the graveyard and sweep his eyes slowly over the rolling acres of corn and wheat and tobacco and pasture land.

  And Marsh watching him saw something lost, and knew that a mind and a strength beyond that of most men had been taken from the country when Sam left it. He understood now why Dorie grieved for him more than for the others who had gone away. He with his hill man's eyes and body seemed to belong here, not away east in cities. He wondered what Delph would think of Sam, and the rest of the day seemed wasted, worse than wasted.

  He listened to songs and sermons, talked with his neighbors, ate various foods that women took from the mighty dinner spread on the ground, and shoved into his hands. But always he watched Sam; saw him greet his mother and his family, saw Katy bring him to meet

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  Delph, saw Delph smile with no flustering and no embarrassment and offer him a piece of her angel food cake, watched Sam help himself and heard him say, "I know it's good, because I read in the paper last year that it took a prize at the fair."

  "Not this same one," Delph said, and they all laughed, and no one, not even Burr-Head, stealing pieces of chicken and bits of cake for the dogs clustered down by the fence, noticed when he came away.

  He knew he was a fool. Delph was no worse than others of the women; Dorie alone seemed in no wise overwhelmed by Sam's homecoming. While Katy and others clustered about him offering him this and that to eat, Dorie heaped a platter with choice pieces of all possible foods, and brought it to Roan and Marsh and Poke Easy who sat together, a little apart from the crowd. "I don't know as any of you deserve anything to eat," Dorie said. "But buck up, my boys. Maybe there'll come a war an' you all can line up fifty farmers from another country an' shoot 'em down, an' then you can come home an' all th' women will make over you, th' way they are now with Sam."

  "Don't be foolish, Maw," Poke Easy said.

  "His work's got nothin' to do with it. They hardly know what he does."

  "But it's got a fine important sound, an' they can see his clothes an' see his car. Lord, such a carworse than Joe'slike he was bawlin' to th' whole world he had money enough to buy a car. No wonder Emma decided to stop off in Lexington for a day to see an old friend that was visitin' there."

  "Aw, Maw," Poke Easy scolded. "It's not his job or his car or his clothes, peoplewomen anyhowfrom all I've ever heard just naturally take to Sam. Recollect how you've been pinin' your life away wantin' to see him all these years."

  "I've had precious little time for pinin', an' anyhow did you ever hear me say I wanted him to come home? I hated to see him go away for good, but I never begged him back."

  Poke Easy got up. "Well, he's here, an' Sam or no Sam I'm goin' over to Flatrock to look at Sol Ping's hogs. Want to go, Marsh? We'll try ridin' that young team a mine."

  "He can't go," Dorie said. "You'll be sundown gettin' home, an' who'll do th' night work for Delph?"

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  "Sam," Marsh said, and strode away with Poke Easy.

  They rode the young team to Sol Ping's farm, a distance up the Long North Fork in the hills. Poke Easy promised to buy the hogs, and when they started home for the afternoon was better than half gone. But when they came to the head of a deep, apparently uninhabited hollow, Poke Easy went to a vine shrouded rock house and bought a quart of moonshine, and after that they rode more slowly.

  The drink was strong in Marsh's mouth and fiery in his stomach. It seemed he could not get his fill of water, but must stop at every trickle of creek or spring for a drink. Poke Easy drank liquor only, and quarreled with Marsh. It was dangerous to drink strange
water when there was so much typhoid about, he said, and Marsh was not inoculated.