Between the Flowers: A Novel

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  Burr-Head nodded and swallowed, remembered he was no girl, and kept his eyes on his father's. He wouldn't have known the man on the bed was Marsh. He was so long and thin, and he was white, sickly white like a potato sprout grown in the dark, and the bones of his face and his hands looked like sticks and rocks ready to cut through the skin.

  He wanted to run away, but he walked on up to the bed, and when Marsh did not lift his hands from the sheet to pat him on the head or whack him on the shoulder as he had used to do, but only whispered, "I guessI ought to ha' waitedto make 'em bring you in," he was certain he was going to cry.

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  Then he looked hard at Marsh's eyes, and knew that everything was all right. He wouldn't cry, but give him time and he would answer properly as man to man. He thought of Perce; he had driven into Hawthorne Town with Perce and Little Lizzie several times this summer and one time Perce met a man who had been sick and he said. He wished he could spit as Perce spat. He couldn't do that, but he did run his fingers through his hair the way Marsh did and say with a little swagger, proud he had remembered, "Well, right now you look holler-eyed as one a Wiley New's cows after a hard cold winterbut, pshaw, you'll fatten up with a little good grazin'."

  His father shook a little and the sweat came on his face, and Mrs. Redmond said, "I made him promise to do everything but not to make you laughI never thought of that," but she smiled at Burr-Head as if she didn't much mind.

  Burr-Head knew he was not to say anything more, so he was still, just looking at the man on the bed, and little by little he found his father. They'd shaved him too close was one thing made him look so strangeespecially for a Thursdayhis shave looked more like Sunday morning in churchand his hair was cut too short, but it was colored still like a red sandrock flecked with gold.

  He asked no questions, and though he felt the nurse's eyes burning a hole in his back, he couldn't help it when Marsh asked one. "What's Delph doin' now, Burr-Head?"

  "Singin' to Sam," he said, and whispered because his father whispered.

  "Where?"

  When he asked that Burr-Head knew his father was all right. His eyes were narrow black the way they were when one of the mules kicked or a bolt worked loose in the cultivator. "Up at th' brick house with Mrs. Elliot," he answered. He wanted to tell him about the tea and the box of candy and the crepe paper dresses for Arbor Day, but the nurse was right behind him, pulling on his shoulder. "Your five minutes are gone, Sonny," she said.

  He walked away, looking back over his shoulder at Marsh, but Marsh stared at the ceiling and never seemed to know he had a Burr-Head. Once out of the house he went running back to tell Delph of his visit with Marsh, but stopped when he came to the orchard fence. Sober and Caesar were driving home the cows, and as Delph

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  wasn't singing nowjust playing the radio, he guessed from the sound he heard, he ran after Sober and Caesar.

  And in the brick house Delph and Sam sat alone in the living room. Mrs. Elliot had for days been so taken up with the problem of making Little Lizzie look like a silver maple tree and one of the fat little Sexton girls a willow for Arbor Day that when she had finished her tea and played a time on the piano, she made her excuses and returned to the green crepe paper.

  Delph, after a moment's painful silence, went to the next room and turned on the radio. When the music came she wished she had not, a waltz it was, one of the old ones filled with the sound of violins, bringing visions of long wax candles burning in great ballrooms where women whirled and bowed in wide-skirted dresses, tinted like acres of flowers, and the men were tall and handsome, graceful and gay, sure of themselves and of the worldlike Sam.

  She turned and he was there, bowing again and saying with that gay smile that made her want to cry, "Shall we dance, Cousin Delphine? It is within the proprieties, for cousins to dance."

  "Yes, Cousin Samuel," she said, and they danced in the wide hall where the coming twilight gathered like blue dust in the corners.

  "Close your eyes, Delph," he said.

  "You are th' one to close your eyesan' I will wear my blue, blue dress trimmed with red, an' th' red rose in my hair an' th' silver slippers, too, I guess. An' I am not Delph th.'."

  "Don't cry, Delph, please don't cryalways remember that in this world you can forget anythinganythingalways remember thateven yourself."

  "But th' neighbors an' GodFronie's Godan' th' God Poke Easy made for High Pockets.I don't want Burr-Head to have a God like that.What if when he grows up."

  "Don't think about the neighbors and God, Delphnot while you're there and I'm here."

  They danced in silence again, and Delph remembered that other dancea long time ago it wasand the violins then had cried of the wider world and all the mysteries it containedand now they cried because there was no worldcould never behad never beenthe only world there was was not in cities or the sea or multitudes of people. It was"The next number will be." Sam snapped off the

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  radio with one hand and held her with the other. "Imagine for just a little while we'rewe're in a square dance, Cousin Delphine, waiting for the music to begin, and there are many others watching us and we."

  "The music would begin; we would dance and the dance end. They always do," she said, and slipped out of his arms, and turned on the radio.

  The music was a march now, a wild strong thing, like the winds and foaming water set to time. Delph listened a moment, then twisted the dial, and turned abruptly away. "But I thought you liked marches and parades and bands and such," Sam said.

  She nodded. "I dobut not today, somehow," she answered and talked on, rapidly as if afraid a silence might say more than her words. "You see it makes me think too much of things, foolish you'd maybe say. But wellI hear them sometimes over the radio like this, their music I mean. Parades I'd like to see with drum majors high steppin' in th' funny hats they wear, an' see th' others beat their drums an' hear th' bugles blow, an' see their uniforms, bright red an' blue I know they wear like men in th' old days wore to waran' horses, oh I'd like to see a lot of fine cat walkin' horses." She stopped and stood confused, twisting her hands. "Oh, even a fool would know me for crazy."

  "You're not crazy, Delph," he said, and took her hands. "I wanted the parades too, and so when I could I went to see them in the cities here and in foreign countries. It was always either too hot or too cold or raining, the sky never blue as it should have been. The uniforms never fit so well as they ought, and some of the men and most of the women you see go walking by were never meant for parades. The flags look old and tiredthey never blow in the wind as they ought, but tangle and twist or maybe hang straight down, and the horses are never so fine as the ones you've seen in fieldsand finally you get tired and walk away."

  "But still I'd like to seehave all that knowin' for myself."

  "And I guess if you were in one, marching in time to the music,I never wasthere'd maybe be something else you'd want, maybe a real war to go walking to, or maybe you'd just be tired of the walking.Anyway, Delph, it's better, I think,I think they're finer if you never see them, just sit and listen to the music and imagine how they must be."

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  "Your eyes don't speak with your tongue, Sam."

  He pulled her hands together and pressed them under his own. "I have to say something, Delph. You can't live always eating your heart away with wonder, the way I used to be. Please take my word for it, and let me comfort you."

  "You took nobody's word for it. You went out to find yourself an' learn how th' world islike anybody would like to do."

  "It's different with a woman, Delph. My mother, I think, has more fun out of our going away and doing this and that than any one of us has ever had. She was talking the other night of how of late years she was glad we'd goneand howDelph, please, look at me, my eyes are not lying now."

  "It was different with your mother," she answered after a moment in a low voice, almost a whisper. "She had children that were a part of herif I gave bi
rth to a dozen I'd never have one that was a part of me. Burr-Head he." She stopped and looked at him with her hungry, empty eyes. "If I could have just one that would seemwhen it got olderto be a part of mean' not go flyin' away like Burr-Headso different when they're little boys from what they were when they were babies. An' every year he'll go farther away an'". She pulled her hands away, straightened her shoulders and smiled at him. ''It's time I went to see Marsh now. He's able to know me again."

  "Yes, Cousin Delphine," he said and smiled. "I thank you for a very pleasant afternoon.... I maybe won't be seeing you soon. I'm going for a horseback tour of the mountains."

  "I hope you have a pleasant time," she said, and wished he wouldn't try to smile, and wondered why she did.

  They shook hands at the door, but he lingered a moment over her hand and asked, "May I come sometime before I go east to tell you goodbye, Delph?"

  She hesitated. "Cousin Delphine, you mean to tell goodbye."

  "NoI want to see Delph againplease."

  "Delph will see you againmaybe," she whispered, and turned then and ran up the stairs.

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  27

  The fall that year was a farmer's fall. October brought high-skied, windless days when the valley lay filled with yellow dusty light that seemed less air and sunshine than some special manifestation of that particular fall. For Marsh each day was something more than hours of a life, but was like a stay in some well earned paradise where his life and all the life on his land was fine, beyond his dreams. He had never known a vacation, a time when he was neither working nor looking for work, but since Dr. Andy and all the neighbors as well as Delph reminded him continually that he must take things easy, he did no extra work that fall.

  Sober and other hired men had cut the corn and dug the sweet potatoes, and he had ridden to Hawthorne Town in Elliot's car and attended to this and that so that the most pressing of the work was done. There were whole days when he did little except the barn-work; and that left long free hours for walking about in the fine fall weather with Burr-Head and Caesar. Sometimes they gathered hickory nuts and walnuts that grew on the rough land above the creek. Other times they crossed the creek, and went to a forgotten stretch of worn out meadow land where the wild rose pips were red in the sage grass, and in the corners of rotting rail fences the clustering vines of bursting bittersweet made clouds of deep orange flame.

  He and the child would go walking back to the house, their arms burdened with many things. They would leave their loads on the empty hearth and go to the kitchen and Delph. There, all the enchantment and the essence of the fruitful fall seemed gathered in the jars and crocks that Delph filled with jellies and ketchups and

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  preserves and pickles, and through the house there was the smell of fruit and spices and of cider bubbling into apple butter.

  Marsh would call as he had always called when he entered the house, "Home, Delph?" and she would answer as she usually did, "Here, in th' kitchen, Marsh."

  He and Burr-Head would go to stand in the kitchen door, and Delph would turn and smile at them, push a sweat dampened curl from her forehead with the back of one hand, and say, "Havin' a good time, you two?" and then turn back to her work.

  Burr-Head would go running away to rake leaves in the yard or hunt chinkapin on the hill, but Marsh would linger in the kitchen door, and hunt with his eyes for some kitchen work he could do, and if there were a pan of pears half peeled or short core apples to be cut and cored, he would sit by the kitchen table and do the workjust to keep him there by Delph. But most always she would smile or laugh a tight little laugh and send him away. "I'll manage," she would say. "Th' Lord knows you've got a little somethin' good comin' to you now."

  When she had spoken thus a time or so he would go to do some fiddling work in the barn, maybe, or simply to walk over his corn and pasture lands and plan crops and work for the coming year. The plans tangled sometimes in his head, while his mind went back to Delph in the kitchen. He wished she would leave the canning and the pickling and come walking with him. He wished that in the evenings when he lighted a fire in the fireplace against the early cold, she wouldn't just sit staring into the fire or reading books that Sam had loaned her or suggested that she readso she had said. Still, when he spoke to her, she always smiled and listened to whatever he had to say, and then next day she never knew what it was he had said.

  He knew she was tired, worn with all the weeks of worrying after him. The circles under her eyes and the sudden thinness in her checks were proof of that. Now that he was well and walking about he was ashamed and sorry for the way he had acted during the last part of his sicknesswhen he was well enough to sit up in bed and fret and fume over what was happening on the farm, and reckon in his head how much his sickness had cost him. There were days when the never being allowed to eat enough of the few little things

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  that Dr. Andy permitted him to have to kill the wracking pains of what he had been certain was certain suicide by slow starvation, had made him impatient and cross as a fretful child.

  The thought of all that money going to a nursesix or seven dollars a daywhen nothing ailed him except a bit of weakness had caused him to dismiss her, much to Dorie's disgust, a long time before he was well.

  The whole burden of his tending had fallen on Delph. Still, no matter if he yelled for buttermilk six times within an hour, she had never complained. It was strange to find her patient and so kind, and when he apologized and pitied her for having such a husband as he had done almost every day, she had only smiled and said, "Pshaw, Marshit's better to be here busy with you than just wanderin' around like I was all summer. Not even livin' at home." And that old lonesome look would come in her eyes, and with it she was so far away.

  He would think sometimes of Sam, and ugly wonders and misgivings would come into his head, and he would hate himself and try to think of other things. It was pure sin to notice little things that meant nothing; there had been the one day that Sam was home after a three-week horseback ride through the mountains. It was foolish to remember it so, that all that day Delph had sat breaking late cornfield beans on the back porch. He was just getting able to walk a bit then, and every time he came to the back porch there she was with her hands and her lap filled with beans, but her eyes on Dorie's house. And he was somehow glad that Sam never came to see them, but drove on to a camping trip with Roan in the Rockcastle Countryand he hoped that when he came from there he would go straight on and back to his work where he belonged.

  But more than anything he wished she would help him plan for the stone house he was going to build; be Delph again talking with her hands and her mouth and her eyes. He knew the loss of the brick house hurt, and he was sorry that she had learned of it by accident through Burr-Head, and not as he had planned. Still, when he had explained how it was, she had listened in silence with lowered eyesuntil he had wondered half angrily if she had even thought on what he was saying. And when he asked her what she thought, she had answered in a quiet voice that told no more than her lowered eyes, "Yes, it's th' sensible thing, Marsh."

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  And now on the evenings when they all climbed up the hill together to see the sun go down, and he and Burr-Head paced off the dimensions of the stone house and planned where windows and chimneys should be, Delph usually sat on Solomon's fence and never seemed to know what he and Burr-Head did. She never seemed to know what the stone house really was, and how terribly much life held for him that fall.

  Though he had mentioned it but little, he had hoped at times that she would maybe plan as she had used to do for many things, and see the day when he was able to drive his team into Hawthorne Town as a great day in their lives, worthy of many plans. He wished she would get a new fall dress for herself to wear on the day they all went together to the town. He had Elliot's money in the bank, and all that remained to be done was have old Silas Copenhaver count the interest due on the remainder of the mortgage, and he would pa
y it all then, there in the bank with Delph and Burr-Head looking on. Burr-Head was too little to know the taste of a mortgaged farm; and that was where a great lot of the goodness lay. Burr-Head would never remember that once he had lived on a mortgaged farm.