by Tillie Olsen
Once, hungry, degraded, after a beating from Anna for some mischief, Mazie lay by the roadside, bedded in the clover, belly down, feeling the earth push back against her, feeling the patterns of clover smell twine into her nostrils till she was drugged with the scent. The soft plodding of a buggy gathered into her consciousness.
She turned on her back. Above the stars clustered, low, bright, still-winged. As if she had never seen them before. Her breath caught. The buggy was stopping, and an old man got out. Old Man Caldwell.
“Lost?” he breathed softly in the soft night.
“No, just watchin the stars. I live in that house over there—Holbrook’s house. My name’s Mazie Holbrook.”
He came over and lay down beside her, so quiet in the dimness he did not seem to be there. He was looking up too, making it a trusting dark.
“Stars,” she began. “What are they now? Splinters offn the moon, I’ve heard it said. But more likely they’re lamps in houses up there, or flowers growin in the night. I’d like to smell the smell that would be comin offn those flowers.”
He raised up on his elbow, staring at her. Then said, “Stars are suns. Like our sun. But so far away—so many miles no one can imagine—they look tiny.”
“You know them things? Then what is the sun, a fire?”
“Miles of fire, many times bigger than the earth. But more than fire.”
“Yes, a fire. Now I know I can see that the stars are fire, for they are dancin now like a fire movin.”
He laughed. Then told her why the stars seemed dancing, how old stars were, how they lived and died, and of a people living long ago, the Greeks, who had named these stars and had found in their shapes images of what was on earth below. As his words misted into the night and disappeared, she scarcely listened—only the aura over them, of timelessness, of vastness, of eternal things that had been before her and would be after her, remained and entered into her with a great hurt and wanting.
Hot midsummer nights when the bedroom of sweating, tossing bodies was too much for her, she would slip out into the fields and the sad hurt would gather into her again, seeing an old old people lying in just such a field, tracing out names and images in the heavens where splashes of enormous fire whirled, eternal and timeless, and tangled comets hissed.
One day, coming in because the hot dust pricked her feet so, she saw him again, sitting with Ben on his lap, watching Anna put up tomato preserve. He was saying, “Vultures running it now. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s Republican or Democrat; the same hand pulls the strings.” She was going to ask him what he meant, but Anna answered into the kettle of steaming tomatoes, “The bellwether leads the flock all right, but who is it sees they go how he wants? The one that trains the bellwether.”
“Exactly … when I came out, a man had some chance. The only thing against him was nature, locusts and drought and lake frost. You took your chance. That was all you had to fight. But now that hardly matters. There’s mortgage, taxes, the newest kind of machinery to buy so you do as good as the other fellow, and the worry—will it get a price this year.”
Anna stopped stirring, straightened up, steam or sweat beaded on her intense face. “In college, did you learn why all that is?”
“In college …” He choked off his words and his face went frozen. “My education began after I got out of college.” Then seeing Mazie, “Hello, my stargazing companion … Mrs. Holbrook, children have marvelous minds. I hate to see what life does to ’em.”
Fall came. A dribble of gaudy leaves over the roads. Sheets of taffeta-gold corn brimming the fields. Days alive with the throb of the threshing machine and the low moo of cows calling across the meadows. Under the full moon, the kids sang and played hide-go-seek in the hay, or listened to hear the apple trees plop their fruit upon the ground.
School began. Mazie and Will went for the first time. The playground squirming with kids was wonderful, but the teacher that waddled and held her head like a duck and her wheezing horror—“Eight years old and can’t read yet, you’ll have to go in the first grade with your brother Will”—was shame. Yet the lessons came easy—the crooked white worms of words on the second-grade blackboard magically transforming into words known and said, although they were still stumbling over the first-grade alphabet. Finding the two could suddenly read, the teacher put them both up one grade, but the primer already breathlessly raced through with only silly sentences as a reward, they spent most of their time secretly listening to the upper grades recite geography and history—far countries, strange peoples.
Anna’s face would glow. “What did you learn today?” And Mazie would try to tell her. “See, Jim,” she would say, handing Mazie or Will a catalogue, hearing them stumble through the words. “See? They’re reading. They’ll be something, these kids.”
For the first time, Mazie was acutely conscious of her scuffed shoes, rag-bag clothes, quilt coat. Stripping corn, she kept the soft silk; buried in the hay, she would dream of somehow weaving it into garments incredible. But the tassels withered, grew brown and smelly, and she had to throw them away. Sometimes, when the sadness in her heart became intolerable, she gathered Will and Ben and baby Jim about her and recited for them a poem learned from Old Man Caldwell. Not in his chaffing tones, but in a deep mysterious voice:
O Were I a Lum Ti Tum Tum
In the land of the alivoo fig
I’d play on the strum ti tum tum
To the tune of the thinguma jig.
Here, her voice would ripen into tragedy:
And if in the Lum Ti Turns battle I fall
A thingamys all that I crave
Oh bury me deep in the whatcha may call
And plant thingumbobs over my grave.
Reciting it, the sadness would ebb; the autumn world became blue and gold again.
One autumn dusk, with the calling of birds making her restless and a great gilt sunset clotting over the prairie, Mazie left the smoky kitchen and ran down the road. There was something to escape from. The autumn air, sweet with mellow death. But more, something in the kitchen; her father with anger riding on his brow, the shadow curtaining her mother’s eyes. Momma’ll hit me for runnin way thout doin the dishes, she thought, but a hunger and fear pushed her forward.
There was a great star glowing in the heart of the sunset, like a still candle in a vast unmoving flame. She could feel its glow on her face. As it sank, she began to run across the fields, to follow it; the corn stubble cut into her bare feet, but she knew only the sky dimming, the great star pulling down over the horizon, into the night, and something vanishing with it. Then it was gone, only darkness left, standing very tall and black about her.
With a bite of agony, she felt the slashes in her feet. Whimpering softly, a great void swelling in her, she started to find the road. Up ahead a big quiet hulk loomed, with a sultry light in one window. Caldwell’s house, she thought; that must be Caldwell’s house.
Bess Ellis answered the door. “Why, Mazie! What’s brought you all the way up here?”
“I …” Her feet made a silent screaming. “I come to borry a book or a catalogue for to read.”
Bess opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. “Well, come in. Dad’s pretty sick, I guess you know; but he’ll be glad to see you.”
Mazie walked into the light; stared incredulous. There was a gleaming sink and a great white cabinet. Upon the table, on a white tablecloth, glowed a bowl of vegetables bursting with snow cabbage and crimson tomatoes and hard round radishes. In the other room she could see a white plaster head and a wall of books.
Blood dribbled from her feet onto the kitchen linoleum; guiltily she forbade herself to notice. Bess was calling from the other room, “Come on into Dad’s room—he wants to see you.” He lay in the bed, curiously withered. Unmoving, only his eyes alive. Mazie took a step backward.
His fragile voice shattered about her. “Come by the bed, child.” His hand, only a shadow of weight, embraced her shoulder. “I’m g
lad you came, Mazie. I think about you. How is your mother?”
She did not know what to say. A fear hovered. Outside the window there was still a faint light low in the west, like vanishing wings of birds. She fastened her eyes there. He kept on talking.
“Tell her to come see me, your mother. You remember what you thought the stars were, Mazie, before I told you?”
She nodded.
“Splinters of the moon, you said. Or maybe flowers in the night. Keep that wondering, Mazie, but try to know. Build on the knowing with the wondering. Mazie …”
She had to turn her eyes to him. His head was moving from side to side as if something were caught choking in his throat.
“Mazie. Live, don’t exist. Learn from your mother, who has had everything to grind out life and yet has kept life. Alive, felt what’s real, known what’s real. People can live their whole life not knowing.”
The words were incomprehensible. They parched the fear, but thirstily she still watched his eyes.
“You don’t know how few… ‘Better,’ your mother says, ‘to be a cripple and alive than dead, not able to feel anything.’ But there is more—to rebel against what will not let life be. Your mother thought to move from the mine to the farm would be enough, but …”
The hand was suddenly heavy on her shoulder. He raised himself.
An old man, Elias Caldwell, death already smothering his breast, tries to tell a child something of all he has learned, something of what he would have her live by—and hears only incoherent words come out. Yet the thoughts revolve, revolve and whirl, a scorching nebula in his breast, sending forth flaming suns that only shatter against the walls and return to chaos. How can it be said? Once I lived in softness and ease and sickened. Once I chose a stern life, turning to people hard, bitter and strong—obscure people, the smell of soil and sweat about them—the smell of life … But I failed. I brought them nothing. To die, how bitter when nothing was done with my life. And the nebula whirls and revolves, sending its scorching suns that break in a chaos of inarticulateness about this child with a sound of fear. Nothing of it said.
His voice goes on. “Whatever happens, remember, everything, the nourishment, the roots you need, are where you are now.”
The voice falters, dies; no, none of it can be said when I myself do … not… know.
Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her—of it being someone other than she sitting there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second. And she creeps her hand over the hand that lies on her shoulder. He laughs. A musical grieving sound. Calling, “Bess, see she gets some of the books. Those fairy tales, Wilde’s, and the Dickens and Blake, and that book of Greek myths. Someday she will read them.
“Goodbye, my wonder-gazer companion.”
Whimpering, running down the road, each step pain, the shadows were long and clutched at her, the corn by the wayside, some fallen, some shorn, was desolate and terrible, a flesh of her flesh.
Coming to the kitchen, she heard her father’s angry voice: “They’re taking all of it, every damn thing. The whole year slaved to nothing. I owe them—some joke if it wasnt so bloody—I owin them after workin like a team of mules for a year. They’re wantin the cow and Nellie … takin Fred Benson’s farm and Eldridge’s. Batten on us like hogs. The bastards. A whole year—now I’m owin them.”
The wind started a laughter in the fallen dried leaves, stirred them round and round senselessly in a mocking mimicry of being alive, rose in mocking laughter through the trees and beat it up over the sky.
Caldwell died a week later. Mazie never got the books—Jim sold them for half a dollar when he got to town, though Anna cursed him for it. As for Mazie’s slashed feet, it was weeks before she could do without rag bandages, could bear the wearing of shoes.
Overnight in late October, the ground grew hard and unyielding. Mazie and Will, trudging to school, felt their blood draw into little lumps under their skin and congeal under the touch of the wind. Tears would be frozen down their faces by the time they reached the schoolhouse, and Willie’s feet, in their torn shoes, insensible. The snow came and fastened itself upon the earth. Finally it lay in too high waves of white over the fields, so that Mazie and Will had to stay home. Then the school itself closed.
Days were dim and short. Snow lay on the earth continually—blinding white at noon, yellow and old at dusk, ghost white at night. Life ceased beyond the kitchen. In the circle of warmth around the stove, everything moved and revolved. Distance was enormously magnified by the cold. Far and far it seemed to the woodpile; to the henhouse, where the hens gathered in drooping ovals of dejection, their cheeps coming out in little frozen spears; to the stable, where the sweet rotting smell of hay and the great cloud of warm breath from the cow stained the air. They scarcely moved from the stove. All day they sat around, Will’s staccato cough mingling with Baby Jim’s ceaseless sniffling. Anna was pregnant again—caught in the drowse of it, drugged by the warmth, she let things be. In the yellow kerosene light at night, she sewed or thumbed over the pages of a catalogue. But the other work she left. Dirty clothes gathered into a waiting pile, bacon drippings coiled greasy in the bottom of the pans, bread went unmade, and the smell of drying diapers layered over the room. Meals were quick, slapped together, half burned. It drove Jim crazy. The untidiness, the closeness, the inaction. The querulous children, half sick, always hungry—thinning, while Anna grew monstrous fat as if she were feeding on them.
“A woman’s goddam life,” he would shout, “sittin around huggin a stove.” Then contrite, jerk out long fiery stories to the kids, sometimes stopping abruptly in the middle to brood. He whittled toys for them—blocks, dolls, animals, and gentle with Anna, straightened up for her, kneaded the bread. But when it was time for the chores, for the first time he would be eager, alert.
Quarrels flared up. Sometimes he beat up on the kids. Anna, the dream paralysis on her, unlike her old self, scarcely seemed to hear or care. “Snowed in like this leaves a man too much with himself,” Jim would explain. “He starts askin why, and what for, like a kid.”
One day through the sad sifting sound of snow came the high cheep of newborn chicks. Jim ran out. “Some fool hen hiding her eggs and settin. Wonder she didn’t pick out the ice on the crick to set on. C’mon, Mazie.” He piled them into her apron. Very alive and vital she felt in all the frozen world, but inside the house again, with a tiny oval of fluff against her cheek, barely moving, a shadow of sorrow fell on her heart. They put the chicks in the oven to warm, and Jim disappeared—probably to plow through the snow to a neighbor’s for drink and talk.
The afternoon was a short gray blur; whirring of white against the windows, and stillness, except for the crackling of icicles and the short quick spfft of wood in the stove. Nobody noticed when the cheep became hysterical and finally ceased. Mazie and Ben peopled a city with things cut out of a catalogue, while Will watched them, his head a tangle of fever, remembering how the snow had soaked through his shoddy shoes and he could not be out till spring. Anna sat unmoving by the stove, her hands over her belly, a half smile of wisdom on her mouth, coming out of her dream to say, “Wipe Jim’s nose, Mazie. I see the grease didn’t do no good to drive that cough out, Will.” And then sinking back into the dream again.
Jim came in. He stood at the door a moment, blind. For the first time, they noticed the smell of burning. “Crissake.” He swung to the oven in one step and opened it. “The chicks, sure enough. Roasted to death. Have I got a bunch of dummies in here that can’t even smell?”
No one answered. With shocked eyes, they stared. “Dumb, too? Your mouths stuffed up like your noses with crap? But you’ll smell ’em.” He grabbed Anna and forced her down by the open oven. “You’ll fill your eyes with ’em.”
She flung herself free. “Don’t you touch me.”
“Don’
t touch ya, huh. You don’t always talk like that. No wonder I never got anywhere. No wonder nothing ever comes right. Lots of help I get from my woman.”
“You get plenty. Kitchen help, farm help, milkin help, washwoman help. And motherin too.”
“Who asked for your goddam brats?”
“Who? I’ll never have another, to starve to death with you.”
“No wonder we’re starvin. Look at the woman I got.”
“Poppa, stop, Momma, don’t,” Ben was screaming. Mazie held Jim scooped in her arms, her head buried in his baby body to stifle the sounds. Only Will moved. He was pulling on his father’s pants leg, shouting, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”
“Oh, fine bargains you make, fine bargains,” Anna taunted. “Anybody can cheat you out of anything. Can’t even make a livin. Fine bargains—how to starve your wife and kids quickest.”
“Shut up.”
“Oh sure, it was all goin to be fine. A new life, and you made one all right. A new way to keep us cold and wantin.”
“Shut up.” His fist crashed against her shoulder; she sagged under it. For a moment he stared at her, at the crying children, at Will beating him with small fists, at the diapers flapping over the stove, then he went out the door, closing it behind him, dark.
The worst storm in years arose that night. Over the torn and scattered sky, a wild hungry darkness came, then snow, driving in the wind like steel whips. The window in the bedroom shattered on the floor before it, and neither the chair bottom pounded over, or the quilts stuffed around, kept the bitterness out. For three nights they all slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor, Mazie and Anna venturing out only once a day with a bucket of hot coals to warm their hands over when they milked the cow or fed the horse and hog. The chickens they brought to the cellar and bedded in straw.