Janie pushed back the covers and thumped her feet down. Without understanding quite why, she began to get dressed. She got her good plaid dress and the shoes with two buckles, and the knit pants and the slip with the lace rabbits. There were little rabbits on her socks too, and on the sweater, the buttons were rabbits’ fuzzy nubbin tails.
Wima was on the couch, pounding and pounding with her fist. “You wrecked my cel,” she said, and drank from a squarestemmed glass, “ebration, so you ought to know what I’m celebrating. You don’t know it but I’ve had a big trouble and I didn’t know how to hannel it, and now it’s all done for me. And I’ll tell you all about it right now, little baby Miss Big Ears. Big Mouth. Smarty. Because your father, I can hannel him any time, but what was I going to do with your big mouth going day and night? That was my trouble, what was I going to do about your big mouth when he got back. Well it’s all fixed, he won’t be back, the Heinies fixed it up for me.” She waved a yellow sheet. “Smart girls know that’s a telegram, and the telegram says, says here, ‘Regret to inform you that your husband.’ They shot your father, that’s what they regret to say, and now this is the way it’s going to be from now on between you and me. Whatever I want to do I do, an’ whatever you want to nose into, nose away. Now isn’t that fair?”
She turned to be answered but there was no answer. Janie was gone.
Wima knew before she started that there wasn’t any use looking, but something made her run to the hall closet and look in the top shelf. There wasn’t anything up there but Christmas tree ornaments and they hadn’t been touched in three years.
She stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing which way to go. She whispered, “Janie?”
She put her hands on the sides of her face and lifted her hair away from it. She turned around and around, and asked, “What’s the matter with me?”
Prodd used to say, “There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food.” Actually the principle hardly operated here, for his contact with markets was slight. It was a long haul to town and what if there’s a tooth off the hayrake? “We’ve still got a workin’ majority.” Two off, eight, twelve? “Then make another pass. No road will go by here, not ever. Place will never get too big, get out of hand.” Even the war passed them by, Prodd being over age and Lone—well, the sheriff was by once and had a look at the halfwit working on Prodd’s, and one look was enough.
When Prodd was young the little farmhouse was there, and when he married they built on to it—a little, not a lot, just a room. If the room had ever been used the land wouldn’t have been enough. Lone slept in the room of course but that wasn’t quite the same thing. That’s not what the room was for.
Lone sensed the change before anyone else, even before Mrs. Prodd. It was a difference in the nature of one of her silences. It was a treasure-proud silence, and Lone felt it change as a man’s kind of pride might change when he turned from a jewel he treasured to a green shoot he treasured. He said nothing and concluded nothing; he just knew.
He went on with his work as before. He worked well; Prodd used to say that whatever anyone might think, that boy was a farmer before his accident. He said it not knowing that his own style of farming was as available to Lone as water from his pump. So was anything else Lone wanted to take.
So the day Prodd came down to the south meadow, where Lone was stepping and turning tirelessly, a very part of his whispering scythe, Lone knew what it was that he wanted to say. He caught Prodd’s gaze for half a breath in those disturbing eyes and knew as well that saying it would pain Prodd more than a little.
Understanding was hardly one of his troubles any more, but niceties of expression were. He stopped mowing and went to the forest margin nearby and let the scythe-point drop into a rotten stump. It gave him time to rehearse his tongue, still thick and unwieldy after eight years here.
Prodd followed slowly. He was rehearsing too.
Suddenly, Lone found it. “Been thinking,” he said. Prodd waited, glad to wait. Lone said, “I should go.” That wasn’t quite it. “Move along,” he said, watching. That was better.
“Ah, Lone. Why?”
Lone looked at him. Because you want me to go.
“Don’t you like it here?” said Prodd, not wanting to say that at all.
“Sure.” From Prodd’s mind, he caught, Does he know? and his own answered, Of course I know! But Prodd couldn’t hear that. Lone said slowly, “Just time to be moving along.”
“Well.” Prodd kicked a stone. He turned to look at the house and that turned him away from Lone, and that made it easier. “When we came here, we built Jack’s, your room, the room you’re using. We call it Jack’s room. You know why, you know who Jack is?”
Yes, Lone thought. He said nothing.
“Long as you’re . . . long as you want to leave anyway, it won’t make no difference to you. Jack’s our son.” He squeezed his hands together. “I guess it sounds funny. Jack was the little guy we were so sure about, we built that room with seed money. Jack, he—”
He looked up at the house, at its stub of a built-on wing, and around at the rock-toothed forest rim. “—never got born,” he finished.
“Ah,” said Lone. He’d picked that up from Prodd. It was useful.
“He’s coming now, though,” said Prodd in a rush. His face was alight. “We’re a bit old for it, but there’s a daddy or two quite a bit older, and mothers too.” Again he looked up at the barn, the house. “Makes sense in a sort of way, you know, Lone. Now, if he’d been along when we planned it, the place would’ve been too small when he was growed enough to work it with me, and me with no place else to go. But now, why, I reckon when he’s growed we just naturally won’t be here any more, and he’ll take him a nice little wife and start out just about like we did. So you see it does make a kind of sense?” He seemed to be pleading. Lone made no attempt to understand this.
“Lone, listen to me, I don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
“Said I was going.” Searching, he found something and amended, “ ’Fore you told me.” That, he thought, was very right.
“Look, I got to say something,” said Prodd. “I heard tell of folk who want kids and can’t have ’em, sometimes they just give up trying and take in somebody else’s. And sometimes, with a kid in the house, they turn right round and have one of their own after all.”
“Ah,” said Lone.
“So what I mean is, we taken you in, didn’t we, and now look.”
Lone did not know what to say. “Ah” seemed wrong.
“We got a lot to thank you for, is what I mean, so we don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
“I already said.”
“Good then.” Prodd smiled. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, mostly from smiling.
“Good,” said Lone. “About Jack.” He nodded vehemently. “Good.” He picked up the scythe. When he reached his windrow, he looked after Prodd. Walks slower than he used to, he thought.
Lone’s next conscious thought was, Well, that’s finished. What’s finished? he asked himself.
He looked around. “Mowing,” he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been—gone in some way.
Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of . . . “Membership” was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.
No, obliterated time didn’t exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.
Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all d
oing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.
That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.
Why should it come back to him now, then?
He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its imbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.
And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs. Prodd hadn’t raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.
Once in the wood, in water and agony, he had been a part of something, and in wetness and pain it had been torn from him. And if, for eight years now, he had thought he had found something else to belong to, then for eight years he had been wrong.
Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was alone. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?
Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist . . . the idea that such as he could belong to anything.
Hear that, son? Hear, that, man?
Hear that, Lone?
He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tied the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods.
*
It was too late even for the copse’s nocturnal habitants. It was cold at the hidden foot of the dwarf oak and as dark as the chambers of a dead man’s heart.
She sat on the bare earth. As time went on, she had slid down a little and her plaid skirt had moved up. Her legs were icy, especially when the night air moved on them. But she didn’t pull the skirt down because it didn’t matter. Her hand lay on one of the fuzzy buttons of her sweater because, two hours ago, she had been fingering it and wondering what it was like to be a bunny. Now she didn’t care whether or not the button was a bunny’s tail or where her hand happened to be.
She had learned all she could from being there. She had learned that if you leave your eyes open until you have to blink and you don’t blink, they start to hurt. Then if you leave them open even longer, they hurt worse and worse. And if you still leave them open, they suddenly stop hurting.
It was too dark there to know whether they could still see after that.
And she had learned that if you sit absolutely still for long enough it hurts too, and then stops. But then you mustn’t move, not the tiniest little bit, because if you do it will hurt worse than anything.
When a top spins it stands up straight and walks around. When it slows a little it stands in one place and wobbles. When it slows a lot it waggles around like Major Grenfell after a cocktail party. Then it almost stops and lies down and bumps and thumps and thrashes around. After that it won’t move any more.
When she had the happy time with the twins she had been spinning like that. When Mother came home the top inside didn’t walk any more, it stood still and waggled. When Mother called her out of her bed she was waving and weaving. When she hid here her spinner inside bumped and kicked. Well, it wasn’t doing it any more and it wouldn’t.
She started to see how long she could hold her breath. Not with a big deep lungful first, but just breathing quieter and quieter and missing an in and quieter and quieter still, and missing an out. She got to where the misses took longer than the breathings.
The wind stirred her skirt. All she could feel was the movement and that too was remote, as if she had a thin pillow between it and her legs.
Her spinner, with the lift gone out of it, went round and round with its rim on the floor and went slower and slower and at last stopped . . . and began to roll back the other way, but not very far, not fast and stopped and a little way back, it was too dark for anything to roll, and even if it did you wouldn’t be able to see it, you couldn’t even hear it, it was so dark.
But anyway, she rolled. She rolled over on her stomach and on her back and pain squeezed her nostrils together and filled up her stomach like too much soda water. She gasped with the pain and gasping was breathing and when she breathed she remembered who she was. She rolled over again without wanting to, and something like little animals ran on her face. She fought them weakly. They weren’t pretend-things, she discovered; they were real as real. They whispered and cooed. She tried to sit up and the little animals ran behind her and helped. She dangled her head down and felt the warmth of her breath falling into the front of her dress. One of the little animals stroked her cheek and she put up a hand and caught it.
“Ho-ho,” it said.
On the other side, something soft and small and strong wriggled and snuggled tight up against her. She felt it, smooth and alive. It said “He-hee.”
She put one arm around Bonnie and one arm around Beanie and began to cry.
Lone came back to borrow an ax. You can do just so much with your bare hands.
When he broke out of the woods he saw the difference in the farm. It was as if every day it existed had been a gray day, and now the sun was on it. All the colors were brighter by an immensurable amount; the barn-smells, growth-smells, stovesmoke smells were clearer and purer. The corn stretched skyward with such intensity in its lines that it seemed to be threatening its roots.
Prodd’s venerable stake-bed pick-up truck was grunting and howling somewhere down the slope. Following the margins, Lone went downhill until he could see the truck. It was in the fallow field which, apparently, Prodd had decided to turn. The truck was hitched to a gang plow with all the shares but one removed. The right rear wheel had run too close to the furrow, dropped in, and buried, so that the truck rested on its rear axle and the wheel spun almost free. Prodd was pounding stones under it with the end of a pick-handle. When he saw Lone he dropped it and ran toward him, his face beaming like firelight. He took Lone’s upper arms in his hands and read his face like the page of a book, slowly, a line at a time, moving his lips. “Man, I thought I wouldn’t see you again, going off like you did.”
“You want help,” said Lone, meaning the truck.
Prodd misunderstood. “Now wouldn’t you know,” he said happily. “Come all the way back just to see if you could lend a hand. Oh, I been doing fine by myself, Lone, believe me. Not that I don’t appreciate it. But I feel like it these days. Working, I mean.”
Lone went and picked up the pick-handle. He prodded at the stones under the wheel. “Drive,” he said.
“Wait’ll Ma sees you,” said Prodd. “Like old times.” He got in and started the truck. Lone put the small of his back against the rear edge of the truck-bed, clamped his hands on it, and as the clutch engaged, he heaved. The body came up as high as the rear springs would let it, and still higher. He leaned back. The wheel found purchase and the truck jolted up and forward onto firm ground.
Prodd climbed out and came back to look into the hole, the irresistible and useless act of a man who picks up broken china and puts its edges together. “I used to say, I bet you were a farmer once,” he grinned. “But now I know. You were a hydraulic jack.”
Lone did not smile. He never smiled. Prodd went to the plow and Lone helped him wrestle the hitch back to the truck. “Horse dropped dead,” Prodd explained. “Truck’s all right but sometimes I wish there was some way to keep this from happening. Spend half my time diggin’ it out. I’d get another horse, but you know—hold everything till after Jack gets
here. You’d think that would bother me, losing the horse.” He looked up at the house and smiled. “Nothing bothers me now. Had breakfast?”
“Yes.”
“Well come have some more. You know Ma. Wouldn’t forgive either of us if she wasn’t to feed you.”
They went back to the house, and when Ma saw Lone she hugged him hard. Something stirred uncomfortably in Lone. He wanted an ax. He thought all these other things were settled. “You sit right down there and I’ll get you some breakfast.”
“Told you,” said Prodd, watching her, smiling. Lone watched her too. She was heavier and happy as a kitten in a cowshed. “What you doing now, Lone?”
Lone looked into his eyes to find some sort of an answer. “Working,” he said. He moved his hand. “Up there.”
“In the woods?”
“Yes.”
“What you doing?” When Lone waited, Prodd asked, “You hired out? No? Then what—trapping?”
“Trapping,” said Lone, knowing that this would be sufficient.
He ate. From where he sat he could see Jack’s room. The bed was gone. There was a new one in there, not much longer than his forearm, all draped with pale-blue cotton and cheesecloth with dozens of little tucks sewn into it.
When he was finished they all sat around the table and for a time nobody said anything. Lone looked into Prodd’s eyes and found He’s a good boy but not the kind to set around and visit. He couldn’t understand the visit image, a vague and happy blur of conversation-sounds and laughter. He recognized this as one of the many lacks he was aware of in himself—lacks, rather than inadequacies; things he could not do and would never be able to do. So he just asked Prodd for the ax and went out.
“You don’t s’pose he’s mad at us?” asked Mrs. Prodd, looking anxiously after Lone.
“Him?” said Prodd. “He wouldn’t have come back here if he was. I was afraid of that myself until today.” He went to the door. “Don’t you lift nothing heavy, hear?”
Janie read as slowly and carefully as she could. She didn’t have to read aloud, but only carefully enough so the twins could understand. She had reached the part where the woman tied the man to the pillar and then let the other man, the “my rival, her laughing lover” one, out of the closet where he had been hidden and gave him the whip. Janie looked up at that point and found Bonnie gone and Beanie in the cold fireplace, pretending there was a mouse hiding in the ashes. “Oh, you’re not listening,” she said.
American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56 Page 23