6
The road to the Ellis farm led out past the fair grounds, the baseball park, and the coal mine into flat open country, where the whole of the horizon was visible, very much as it is in the Delta country. Occasionally, the sweep of land is interrupted there by a line of willows and cypresses, indicating water. Here the interruption was likely to be a hedge fence or a windbreak of pines on the north side of a farmhouse. The clouds that pass over the Delta are larger and in the evening create the gold and rosy colour that they later pass on to the sky. But the Mississippi people, looking around them, saw the heat shimmer that they were accustomed to.
Nora Potter, riding beside Bud Ellis in the front seat of the surrey, found she had misjudged him; he was much nicer than he had seemed the night before, and she could talk to him about the things that were worth talking about. “It’s just that sometimes I feel so full of longing,” she explained, “all kinds of longing—for happiness, for sympathy, for someone who won’t be startled by what I say.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “about what you said about faces. It’s true what you said, every word of it. People do make too much of a fuss about—men especially—about whether a girl is good looking or not. They ought to look for something deeper. It’s a funny thing, but that’s what made me call this morning. I wanted to hear what else you had to say.”
In the fields on either side of the road the grain had been cut and was now standing in yellow shocks flattened by their own weight and by the weather. The corn was a dark, dusty, summer green.
“We crossed the Ohio River just as it was getting light yesterday morning,” Nora said. “I was awake and I kept looking out of the train window. It was like coming into a foreign country. Here the past doesn’t hang over you all the way it does over us. You’re just yourselves, leading your own lives and not grieving over the War Between the States and Sherman’s army. You wake up in the morning and it’s that morning you wake up to. At home I wake up in a world that’s always remembering something—the way things used to be. And trying to get back. And there isn’t any getting back, so of course there isn’t really any waking up. Except for the niggers. They’re happy and irresponsible. I hear them outside my bedroom window, laughing and quarrelling as if they owned the place and we were just there to take care of them. Sometimes I wish I were a nigger or an Indian or anything that would keep me from having to be myself, Nora Potter, who goes to parties and pays calls, and sits by quietly, with nothing to say, while Mama does all the talking.”
“I know what you mean,” Bud Ellis said, nodding. “But there are a lot of people who wouldn’t.”
“I have a great deal to say, but it isn’t recipes, and that’s all the women at home ever talk about. Cooking and sewing and their children and family matters.”
“It’s practically all they talk about here.”
“If you say something that’s an idea,” Nora said, “they look at you as if you’d just gone out of your mind. They actually get embarrassed and after a minute or two start talking about something else. I haven’t anybody at home I can talk to—except Brother, of course. He understands me, in a way, but it isn’t a very good way. There’s no comfort in it. You can’t ever depend on him for anything, and he’s so vain. He spends hours looking at himself in the mirror. I can go to him when I’ve been having trouble with Mama, because he knows how exasperating she is, and how hard I try to get along with her. But when I tell him what I’ve been thinking, what I really believe, he doesn’t listen. Sometimes he looks at me as if he wished I’d quit talking and quit worrying and quit trying so hard. But I have to keep trying. If you don’t do that down home, you’re done for.”
“You’re not telling me a thing I don’t know about,” Bud Ellis said gloomily. “Not a thing, Nora.”
“There’s so much food, and you eat and eat until you can’t breathe, and take longer and longer naps, and plan new clothes and talk about who is related to who, and it’s like a dream. All you need to do is use that easy charm all Mississippi people have—Randolph, Mama, and Papa, everybody but me.”
“Offhand I’d say you have the most charm of any of them,” Bud Ellis said, very seriously.
“You don’t mean that. You’re only being polite, and you don’t need to be with me.”
“I wasn’t being polite,” Bud said. “Cross my heart.”
Nora shook her head. “Don’t you see——” she began.
Although Austin King knew the road, he kept his eyes on the surrey, maintaining just enough distance between the two carriages so that the dust would have a chance to settle ahead of him. When Bud Ellis stopped, so that Nora, who had never seen a threshing combine, could watch the farmers pitching the bound sheaves into the maw of the red machine and the straw spraying out of the big metal snout, Austin stopped too. The surrey started up, after a minute or two, and he touched Prince Edward lightly with his whip and drove on between more stubbled fields, more fields of tall Illinois corn. He was beginning to get used to the Mississippi voices, and to hear more in them than a soft Southern accent. When Randolph had anything to say it was generally addressed to the back seat. Austin’s mind was free to return to town, to the house on Elm Street and the figure of his wife, closing the door of the bedroom where Ab lay in the deep restoring sleep of childhood, taking clean towels out of the linen closet, talking to Rachel, and searching, in all probability, for some new grievance against him. This mirrored image was inaccurate; for a long while that afternoon Martha King sat in the window seat in the library, doing nothing at all. And in one point, Austin’s image of his wife reflected more truth about him than about her. But at least it made him forget the heat and the tiresome drive until suddenly the rich Southern voices, raised in argument, brought him back to reality.
“For heaven’s sake, stop admiring your hands!”
“What else is there to admire?” Randolph asked.
“You can admire the view,” Mrs. Potter said. “Cousin Austin, what are those green warty things?”
“Hedge apples,” Austin said.
“Are they good to eat?”
“I’ve never heard of anybody eating them.”
“How interesting,” Mrs. Potter said.
“For God’s sake, Mother!” Randolph exclaimed. “You’ve seen hedgerows all your life!”
“Maybe I have,” Mrs. Potter said. “I don’t always notice every little detail, like you and Nora. I certainly don’t remember any such warty things growing on the plantation.… Cousin Austin, would it be too much trouble for you to stop the carriage a moment so Randolph can hop down and pick one?”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Randolph said. “If you’d never seen a hedge apple before, I’d get you one gladly, but the grass is dusty and they don’t grow within reach, and the trees have thorns on them. If you want one, you can climb up and get it yourself.”
Austin brought the carriage to a stop, handed the reins to Randolph, and jumped out. In the ditch by the side of the road he found a stick and started throwing it.
“Don’t anyone ever talk to me again about the manners of a Southern gentleman,” Mrs. Potter said.
“You’re the one who’s always talking about Southern gentlemen,” Randolph said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one.”
“You’ve seen your father,” Mrs. Potter said.
After several attempts Austin knocked down one of the hedge apples and brought it over to the cart.
“Thank you, Cousin Austin,” Mrs. Potter said. And then, as they drove on, “Yes, I do believe I’ve seen them before. It seems to me that old Mrs. Maltby has a recipe for making jam out of them. Or perhaps it’s quince I’m thinking of. In any case, I’m going to take it home and ask her. There ought to be something you can do with them, since there are so many.”
In the surrey the conversation had right-about faced, and it was now Bud Ellis who was doing most of the talking. “When anybody tried that hard, you can’t help feeling sorry for them.”
�
��I know,” Nora said.
“But feeling sorry isn’t enough. It ought to be, but it isn’t. Not if you’re a person who—well, never mind. I don’t know how I got started talking like this, except that you’re kind enough to listen to me.” He gave a slap with the reins and made the horse go faster. “She’s very sweet and affectionate and all that, but I know everything she’s going to say before she says it. And the things I say to her half the time she doesn’t hear. Or if she does hear, she doesn’t understand. She gets it all wrong, just the way when she tries to tell the simplest story every single fact comes out changed. Last night I heard her telling your mother about an old stone quarry that we drove out to, a week or so ago. It’s full of water and the kids go swimming in it. I used to swim there a lot when I was growing up, and I heard her saying that the walls were a hundred feet high. Actually, they’re only twenty-five or thirty feet high. I know it’s a small thing and I ought to be able to overlook it, but I sat there chewing my fingernails, and thinking if she’d only get something right, just once!”
Nora glanced around, to see if the English cart was still following. Once before, in Mississippi, a conversation with a married man had taken just such a turn, and she didn’t want this conversation to end up where that one had.
“Even though our paths have led along such distant trails—which I very much regret—I can talk to you and you understand what I’m saying. Mary and I don’t speak the same language or see eye to eye about anything. Our pleasures are never the same. When I come home at night I wonder sometimes why I come to that particular house—why not just any house, since there isn’t going to be anything for me when I get there.”
Nora knew that she ought not to be listening to him. Most of what he said probably wasn’t true, and she ought to be heading him off, now while there was still time. But instead she sat and looked at her gloves. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He was so idealistic, just the way she was, and it seemed as if everybody in the world, whether they were married or not, was looking for the same thing and never finding it.
Staring straight ahead at the dusty road, Bud Ellis said, “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told any living person. I wasn’t in love with her when I married her. I thought I was, at first, and then I woke up one morning and knew it was all a mistake.”
Now is the time, Nora said to herself, but the flippant remark, the observation that would set them back on the right track again, refused to come.
“By that time the wedding announcements had been sent out and all the arrangements made, and you know how it is. I just couldn’t do it. A thing like that, women don’t get over very easily. Especially some women. I thought maybe after a month or two I’d fall in love with her, that it would come about of its own accord, but it hasn’t and now I know it never will. We just aren’t right for each other, and it’s a great shame, because she could have made some man very happy. Sometimes I’ve thought I ought to tell her I don’t love her, but when she looks at me in that way—so sort of anxious and waiting to see whether I’m going to like her new dress or something she’s bought for the house, I just can’t say it. It’s all the same to me whatever she wears. But I tell her she looks fine and she believes what I tell her. That’s the funny part about it. She’s perfectly happy and satisfied. Maybe some day I’ll find a woman I really care about, someone I can share my inmost thoughts with and know that they’re understood—a woman that just being with means everything in the world. If I do, I’ll screw up my courage and make a clean breast of it to Mary. It’ll be hard on her to accept, but not as hard as it would be if there is nobody I care about more than I care about her. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to go on living together and yet utter strangers. I don’t blame her, you understand; it’s my fault, the whole business. I shouldn’t have been so soft-hearted in the beginning. But there are things I know now that I didn’t then. And if a man is going to make his mark in the world, and accomplish his ambitions, he has to have a woman behind him who understands those ambitions and is driving him on.… This may be taking a liberty, but there’s something I want to ask you, Nora. Do you think you could find room in your heart for one more friend?”
Why, Nora wondered wildly, why should it always be a married man who manœuvres his way around the room until he ends up sitting beside me? Is it something I do that I shouldn’t, and that makes a serious conversation, a conversation about life, suddenly turn into something else?
People often ask themselves the right questions. Where they fail is in answering the questions they ask themselves, and even there they do not fail by much. A single avenue of reasoning followed to its logical conclusion would bring them straight home to the truth. But they stop just short of it, over and over again. When they have only to reach out and grasp the idea that would explain everything, they decide that the search is hopeless. The search is never hopeless. There is no haystack so large that the needle in it cannot be found. But it takes time, it takes humility and a serious reason for searching.
7
The surrey and then the English cart turned from the road into a narrow lane with deep ruts in it. The lane led through empty wheat-fields to a gate, and beyond it the farmyard, where a buggy stood with the shafts resting on the ground. Bud Ellis drove around to the side of the house, and Austin followed him. While they were helping the ladies to alight, the old man and his tenant farmer came out of the barn and walked towards the carriages.
“So you came after all,” Mr. Ellis called to them. “I wasn’t sure whether you would or not.”
“You ought to know we wouldn’t let an opportunity like this slip by,” Mr. Potter said, mopping his face with his handkerchief.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you any if you’d changed your mind. It’s a long drive in this heat.… Meet Mr. Gelbach.”
The tenant acknowledged the introduction with a nod and then said, “Be quiet, Shep!” to the dog that was barking at them from ten feet away.
The barking dog and the odour from the pig-pen mingled with the other summer smells were like medicine to the restlessness that had afflicted Mr. Potter’s legs all morning. “A fine place you have,” he said, glancing around.
“The house needs paint and one thing and another,” Mr. Ellis said. “Just now it’s not much to look at, but I’ll get it all fixed up one of these days. With corn selling at thirty-three cents at the grain elevator, I may end up living here.” No one took him seriously and he did not mean that they should. He was knocking on wood in case the ancient gods of agriculture should have noticed his prosperity and consider that it had passed all reasonable bounds.
The tenant farmer unhitched the two horses and led them off to the barn.
“I’ve got something you ladies would enjoy seeing,” old Mr. Ellis said. “My new colt, born two days ago.”
The colt and the mare were in a pasture behind the big barn. “Pretty as a picture,” Mr. Potter said, leaning on the pasture fence. “Yes, that’s worth coming all the way from Mississippi to see.” He called a long string of coaxing invitations to the colt but it wouldn’t come to him.
They went on to take a look inside the big white barn, smelling of manure, hay, dust, and harness; at the corn cribs empty until fall; at the new windmill; at the sheds filled with rusty farm machinery; at the pigs; at the vegetable garden; and finally at an Indian mound down by the creek. A head, ears, nose, legs, and tail were all easily discernible to the people from Mississippi, and Mr. Potter knew about an Indian mound in Tennessee which was said to resemble the extinct Megatherium.
After the Indian mound, Mr. Ellis turned towards the cornfield, and at this point the women were left behind. They were not expected to take an interest in farming, and besides, their shoes were not suitable for walking over ploughed fields. Austin King and the tenant farmer walked along side by side with nothing to say. Each imagined that the other was mildly contemptuous—the farmer of the city man, the man who worked with his head of the man who worked much longer hours an
d harder because he had nothing to work with but his calloused hands.
Austin King was in many ways the spiritual son of Mr. Potter’s tall, gaunt, bearded father, and would certainly have been a preacher if he had been born fifty years earlier. Mr. Potter had had all the justice and impartiality he could stand in his boyhood. He had more than once been tied to the stake and burned alive in his father’s righteous wrath. And so he went on ahead with old Mr. Ellis and his grandson.
No one was ever made to feel morally inferior in Bud Ellis’ presence. Money was what Bud Ellis was after, and this cold pursuit has a tendency to elbow its way into the category of the amiable weaknesses, where it does not belong. For the sake of their warmth and protective coloration, the man whose real pursuit is money will also pursue women or drink too much, or make a point of sitting around with his coat off, his tie untied, his feet on a desk, killing or seeming to kill time. And in that way he can safely say that anyone who appears not to be governed by materialistic or animal appetites is a blue-nosed hypocrite.
As they stripped off ears and compared the size of the kernels, Mr. Potter made the opening move in a game that must be played according to certain fixed rules, like chess—a game in which (as no one had more reason to know than Mr. Potter) hurry is often fatal. He admired whatever old Mr. Ellis admired, and listened to his long, rambling, sometimes pointless stories. Mr. Potter also told stories himself, stories in which he himself was invariably the shrewd hero, sly, tactful, humorous, always coming out on top at the end. These stories, taken together, tended to establish Reuben S. Potter as a sound man of business.
Mr. Ellis was himself a sound man of business. His four hundred acres had been acquired at a tax sale. The old man was quick to scent out a game and usually ready to play—on his own terms, of course, which would not in the final showdown be wholly to the advantage of Mr. Potter.
Time Will Darken It Page 8