Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Marsh drank still more deeply from the next spring, and conscious of Poke Easy's worried eyes, said as he wiped his mouth, "I've never been sick a day in my life, an' I don't aim to be."

  Poke Easy lifted the fruit jar, drank and frowned at Marsh. "You're not like yourself today," he said. "Don't let that brother of mine, Sam, my mother's only son, make a fool out a you. He'll be gone one of these daysI guess."

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  "The corn is laid by. The winter wheat is cut. The trees in our orchards promise heaviest yield in years. Cedar Stump School opened last week with Ezrie Cutler back as teacher. Canning and pickling are the order of the day."

  Delph sat by the kitchen table, and wrote among the jars of cooling jam and little pickled gherkins. She looked at the prickly gherkins, and thought that in winter Marsh liked nothing so well as a plate of beans and cornbread with pickled gherkins. She felt something sliding by her nose, and heedless of whether it be sweat or tear, she wiped it away and wrote again.

  "There is little change in the condition of Marsh Gregory. He is now in his third week of typhoid fever. Your correspondent is thankful for such kind neighbors. We thank the neighbor men for bringing in his hay and laying by his corn, and Sober Creekmore and Samuel Fairchild for looking after his cattle. The women are kind to come and help, and Mrs. Elliot keeps the correspondent's child.

  "The clover hay this year is finer than." She heard Marsh's shriek, and fat black Emma's troubled soothing. "There, there, you're not in burnin' oil. Look, there's that mornin' glory vine. Whoever saw a mornin' glory vine in th' oil fields Ah'd like to know?"

  Delph clenched the table when the cry came again, then slowly her fingers dropped away as the voice changed to senseless, broken mutterings. Dorie came to the door. She looked at Delph, and her eyes were kinder than her voice as she said, "Don't set there lookin'

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  like th' ghost of some white-livered woman. You'll have to learn to take it like anybody else.''

  "But it's been so longthree weeks an' th' fever not left him."

  Dorie poured herself a sip of coffee, and waited a time before speaking. "You might as well know, Delph, thiswhat he's been through is only th' beginnin' He's got it bad. There was Randal Dick, he lay in fever seventy-three days, an' he was a man bigger an' stronger than Marsh."

  "Diddid he get well?"

  "N-o-o. He went when his fever broke. But he was one thing an' Marsh is another.Lord, Lord, Delph, don't be a cryin' an' a buryin' him 'til he's dead. Why don't you go up an' see if you can't maybe help Sam an' Sober in th' hay? It'll do you good to get out."

  "II hate to leave."

  Dorie sighed and set down her coffee cup. "Delphyou might as well knowit's no fault a yours, but did you ever in your life take care of anybody when they were sick?"

  "N-o-o. Aunt Fronie would never let me learnshe said I was too fidgetybut." She sprang up and looked at Dorie with jealous angry eyes. "That's not sayin' I can't at least help to look after Marsh. I'm older nowan' stronger. But neither you nor Doctor Andy'ull hardly let me go about him." She whirled and started toward the door, but stopped when Dorie said, "Delph," with the same note of command in her voice she used sometimes with Katy or her grandchildren.

  She took Delph's bonnet hanging on the kitchen wall and held it out to her. "Delph, this is one time in your life you've got to be sensible. Just because it's your man that's sick is no reason why you, a girl that knows nothin' of nursin' anybody let alone a typhoid patient, can take care of him. Right now Dr. Andy's lookin' all over th' country for a nurse, any kind, either trained or practical, that can manage a typhoid patient like Marsh. An' when she comes you'll not be tip-toein' about him ever' five minutes an' then comin' back to th' kitchen to cry. An' you'll not be sayin', 'Marsh will have a fit if I don't at least put up some pickles an' make a little blackberry jam.'I didn't say anything this mornin'but, Delph, you've got to see you can't be heatin' th' house up with cannin' an' goin' on just because you think it's what he'd want you to do."

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  Delph stood and listened, her face pale and the pupils widening in her eyes, until the eyes seemed black instead of blue; and over all Dorie's words she nodded with slow heavy motions of her head. She continued to nod as Dorie went on, ''From now on you've got to be sensible an' always recollect that Marsh is th' one to think on. It would be better for him an' you, too, if you'd stay with me or up at Elliots. Comin' down th' stairs fifty times a night an' walkin' around over himit's killin' you an' doin' him no good."

  Dorie shoved the sunbonnet into her hands, and she took it and went out the back screen door, taking care to close it gently. Sudden noises sometimes threw Marsh into a frenzy of screaming. After looking about to see that no one watched, she slipped through the iris beds that bordered the stone foundation of the house, and went to stand by a window thick with morning glory vines.

  In the last two weeks she had stood by that window many times. She stood still, careful to touch no leaf or flower, and betray the fact that someone listened there. She heard quick, hard breathing, less like that of a man than of some angry wounded animal, fighting even as it died. She smelled medicine and antiseptic and some other odor that Dorie said was the typhoid, though for her it seemed the smell of death.

  She listened a long while. She hoped to hear a calm word or a regular breath to prove that the thing on the bed was Marsh. There were times when the man with red eyes and sunken cheeks and fever-wasted body did not seem like a manor anything that belonged in her life. Each setting sun seemed less the ending of another day for him than a deeper folding into all the mystery and the majesty of death which now enshrouded him. She could not in the ugly, pain-wracked body see Marsh any more as he had been than she could see flowers that had bloomed on a drought-bitten melon vine. She stood now with bowed head and clenched hands and thought of Marsh, but he was never there behind the vines. Laughing, he was as he walked across the yard on a morning in spring to begin the plowing; frowning over a government bulletin, braiding her hair and flirting with her from the corners of his eyes, playing with Burr-Head by the hearth on winter eveningsbut never that screaming skeleton there on the bed.

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  She moved a step or so away and stood staring at her clenched hands when she heard words from behind the leaves. The words were thick and guttural, and somehow filled with a pain the fever did not bring. "Get away, Delph.Delph, don't take ever'thing I've got, now. Delph, don't make him."

  The voice died in hoarse heavy breathing, and she leaned nearer the vineslistening. She had heard such words at other times. Sometimes they ended in a scream and she would rush away to spend long moments in the cool darkness of the spring house, trying to still the quivering in her hands and throat and heart. She had seen sicknessat least had heard of the ways of fever, it could make any man say foolish things. Dorie had told her that. She had held her and soothed her the first time Marsh talked so. But Dorie had never understood that her terror was not all for Marsh's sickness. Every silent meal, every questioning glance through that hard dry summer, all the plans that he had held away from her as if she were a stranger had come sharp in her memory, and taken new significance from his senseless talk.

  He was so afraid of herhad always been afraid. Now, he screamed more against her than all the gruesome, ugly dangers he had gone through in his oil field days. Many times she had wondered with a hurt that never died, why it was that when they were married he never told her of his dreams and plans, had discussed them with Dorie, but never with her; if she could have had some hand in the shaping of her life on the farm it would maybe have never seemed so ugly as it had used to bebefore Burr-Head. She bowed her head and thought of many things, the years of work that was sometimes drudgery, the never having, the pretending, and the smiling; most of it was done because of him. Not because of duty. She had never thought of that, but only of Marshhe was a part of heror had seemed to be.

  He screamed again; she turned and w
ith her bonnet dangling from her shoulders, ran through the yard, across the road and up the hill. She was out of breath when she came to the grove of trees by Solomon's pasture, and could do no more than fling herself under a walnut tree and stare at the sky. The sky wavered like a country seen through rain-wet glass; she heard blood pound in her ears and her hard heavy breathing, and felt the heat and the sweat of her body

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  after the long hot run in the July weather; but none of such things could quiet her thoughts or shut out the sound of Marsh's screams and cries. She tried to see the sky; it was high and clean and beautiful, withdrawn from all the pain and ugliness of earth. She wondered why it was that in the slow life of a farmer's wife there must be so much hurt and wonder, and this always walking in the dark.

  She heard Solomon bellow from his pasture, and lifted on one elbow and sat listening. She had never tried to drive the wild strong bull, but had always thought she could. Maybe if she went running into his pen and drove him to the barn, the work and the constant danger would make her forget, for at least a little while.

  But she looked quickly in the opposite direction when she heard Sam call to her from the other side of the grove as he came up through the clover field. She sat up and smoothed her apron over her knees, and watched him as he came. Though he wore the rough blue cotton clothes of a working man, he looked very tall and very straight and walked with an easy, springing stride that marked him as being no farmer. He stopped a few feet away by a walnut sapling, and studied her a moment with some trouble in his face, and his eyes gentle as Katy's when she fed a sick lamb. "DelphI know it's none of my business but you can't help Marsh by running around in this heat."

  She drew a long sobbing breath and sat hugging her knees as she asked, "I guess you saw me come runnin' up th' hill, an' thought I was crazy?"

  "I saw you run, but I didn't think you were crazy."

  She hesitated a time, then asked in a low voice, "You know how it isthento run with your legsjust becausebecause th' rest of youwell, there's no runnin away from your head, ever,but sometimes you'd like to try."

  He came nearer and sat with his back against a small tree a foot or so away. "I used toa long time ago," he said, "gallop a horse to some church in th' hills five or ten miles away, that is when I was a boy in schooland it all, I guess, just because I wanted to leave something or find something newmaybe."

  "On windy moonlit nights in fall, I guess," she said. And when he nodded and smiled at her, she wondered as she had wondered at other times how it was he knew so much. He understood without

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  her telling things she had never tried to explain to other peoplenot even Marshbecause she knew they could never understand. Because of all his years away, and his studies, and his work, so different from anything in her life, it seemed that he should have been a stranger, more so than Joe, but he somehow never was, not even at that first meeting in Salem churchyard.

  She had thought at first it was maybe because he looked the way he did, like hill men of the old days: tall and slender and brown, with his blue, blue eyes, and his hair black as a coal, and his gentle, drawling voice, slower, except in moments of enthusiasm, than her own. He was a lot like Katy, a great one for talking when the notion seized him and interested in all things. He was friendly as Poke Easy, but not so blunt in his ways. Still, there was in him a dash of something that made him entirely different from the other Fairchilds; not so much his laughter, Katy laughed as much as he, and Poke Easy was gay enough, but there was in Sam a streak of nonconformity that made it seem sometimes as if that silly, wishful side of her had overflowed and touched someone elseand that someone else was a man she had heard of since she was a little girl and had dreamed sometimes of knowing, and when she did meet him it was as if she had known him always.

  Since Marsh's sickness she had seen a good bit of him, and always he was kind like Dorie, trying in many ways to ease the burden of her trouble. Today, in spite of all her fear and misery, she had to laugh when he told her of his first tuxedo; the troubles he had had with his shirt and his tie, and how when he went calling on his girl to take her to the dancethe reason for all his fineryshe hardly knew him, but made him wait an hour while she changed into another dress, one that matched his get-up better, the girl had said. And she had been so mad she'd hardly danced with him all evening.

  Delph listened and smiled when he unashamedly went on to tell of how he had gone in debt to buy it. "When I was in high school I always wondered how it would be to have a whole new suit at one time. But when I was a senior and graduated I got one. Then when I was in college I wondered how I would look and feel in a tuxedo so I got one. Once when I was in Bermuda I wondered how it would be to have some English tweedsthey cost a lot of money, but I bought three suits. Now, I even have tails and a high silk hatI wondered

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  how I'd look." He laughed. "And it was all because when I was little I didn't have any clothes.I've hardly bought a necktie in three or four years. Mostly Emma's influence, I guess. She was scandalized by my wardrobebut I'm still not ashamed."

  Delph laughed, too. "You're like me," she said. "When I was little, Aunt Fronie always said she didn't want th' neighbors to think she didn't do right by her nieceso I had a lot of clothesnice sensible ones, but never what I wanted." She gave Sam a speculative glance, and seeing that he understood, went on. ''Now, Marsh fusses at me sometimes because I don't dress up more, but, pshaw, I don't care, not that kind of clothes. But I would like to have a real little bathing suit, red or black, th' kind your mother or even your sister Emma would die to see me wearan' Marsh would faint. An' thenI guess it was because all th' people that belonged to our church were sinners if they dancedI've always wanted a w-i-ide, long-skirted, red silk dressreal red, red as a black gum leaf in th' fallan' with no sleeves an' not much shoulders an' no backhardly anything but a little front an' a lot of skirt. I would wear a red flower in my hair, an' my slippers." She paused to consider the matter of the slippers, and Sam eased his back against the tree, and pointed to a thunder head.

  "Silver for your slippers like the edge of that cloud," he said.

  But Delph was not so certain. "I don't know about silver slippers for a red dress. Now if it were blueI'll make it bluea bright blue like th' sky fresh after a rain, an' on th' skirt I'll have bands of red, th' bright shade to match that kind of blue."

  "If it would change like your eyes," he said, "they." He stopped and sat confused, as if he had remembered that she was Delph, the farmer's wife.

  But Delph didn't mind; many had praised her eyes; and Sam seemed more like a friend or a cousin whom she had known as a child, and even though he had been gone away for a long long time, he was just as he had used to be. "Your eyes are like that, too," she said. "Th' kind they used to say in th' old days, 'th' wind blows through'; I'll bet you can't tell lies either or keep people from knowin' you don't like 'em so wellth' trouble I'm always havin' with people like Sadie Huffacre." And she turned and smiled at him and studied his eyes, fixed now on the sky.

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  "It's worse when they learn you like themtoo much," he said, and got up. He stood a moment looking down at her, before he said, "Delph, please, soon as my back is turned don't be crying and running through the heat and eating your heart away.He wouldn't like it, I know."

  Her throat hurt, and she wished he wouldn't go away. He was so gay and happy in his ways; he, more than anyone else, made her feel that everything would be all right. "I don't aim to cry," she began, bravely enough, but her throat kept tightening as she tried to go on, "but there isn't anythingthat can change it. He's maybemaybe layin' there a dyin'an'." Her eyes widened and darkened; she sat a moment looking up at him, then dropped her head on her drawn up knees, and cried as no one but Marsh had ever seen her cryand that was a long time ago. Marsh couldn't get well. She knew he couldn't. She tried to see some life for her and Burr-Head past his death, but it was like looking into a dark, empty, soundles
s room.

  Sam dropped to the ground beside her; she felt his hand on her arm, and heard him say, "Please, Delphplease don't cry." He said that and a lot of other things. Gradually, she found herself listening as he said, "You're young, Delph. You could do anything you want to do, or be anything you want to be.It may seem hard advice, but try to look through th' trouble, Delph. There's always something aheadtill you die."