The Dollmaker

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

  She glanced at him as he curved his long narrow body over the stove top, shivered, rubbed his hands, then stretched with a mighty gaping and reaching up until his fingers touched the sloping cross beams of the lean-to kitchen. “Git yer coffee, honey, off th warmen oven; it’ll warm you up. Then you’d better hurry; it’ll be gitten late,” she said.

  “Oh, Law, my old woman a wanten to be shet a me,” he said with the same bright-eyed teasing look she had known when they were boy and girl together. He hugged her with both arms about her shoulders, playfully pushing his chin into the back of her neck, jiggling her so that she tipped the wooden mixing bowl until buttermilk sloshed on the table.

  She jerked one elbow back against him, and spoke sharply as she might have to one of the children. “Aw, Clovis, look at the gome you’ve made me make. Now git on. You’ll git there jist when th bus is a pullen out.”

  His hands slipped from her shoulders, but he stood an instant, his chin pressed against her, like a child’s head leaning. “Oh, Gert, lots a time I think you don’t love me, nary a bit.”

  The words were the same he had used many times, but the tone was different, less teasing, almost sad. He’d have her blubbering in a minute, making a fool of herself, like down at her mother’s. She tried to put a teasing into her voice as she hunched her shoulders to get his chin off, for his breath was dampening her back hair. “Lord, man, you’re a big un to talk a love. Tie me hand an foot in a burnen house an have ole Uncle Ansel come to tell you his ole grist mill was down agin—you’d run off first to see what ailed th mill.”

  “Aw, Gert, you’re jealous a machinery like it was another woman.” He looked about the ramshackle kitchen, his eyes on the bare, rough-planked, big cracked floor as he said, “I cain’t much blame ye—fer all my machine fixen an coal haulen it’s been a pore do.”

  He went into the main room to put on the clean overalls she had laid out on the rocking chair, but was back in an instant, shivering, reaching in the woodbox for kindling. “The youngens’ull freeze when they git up.”

  Gertie dumped the dough onto the biscuit board and frowned at him. “Now, Clovis, they ain’t a bit a use a builden a fire an a waken th youngens.”

  “But I want tu tell em goodbye.”

  “But, honey, it ain’t like you was a goen off to war this mornen—jist th examination. Why—why you mightn’t pass, an if you do they won’t take you right away. If’n it’s too cold in there, put yer clothes on here in th kitchen. I won’t be a watchen.”

  Clovis did as she directed, but kept glancing toward the room where the children slept. “Jim Whittaker, he never got back,” he reminded her in a moment.

  “It was just cause he didn’t want to come back an wait around,” she said.

  He slapped his razor on the strop hanging from a nail by the kitchen door. “That waiten won’t be no fun. Since Uncle Ansel cain’t git hands, an hardly nothen a what he needs to run his mine, they ain’t no coal to haul.”

  “We’ve got grub to run us an—we’ll git by,” Gertie comforted. She felt guilty, and tried not to want to tell him of all the money she had saved. She punched out flat rounds of dough and laid them in the bake skillet, shoved the skillet into the oven, turned the sowbelly, pushed it to one side of the frying pan, and then got the now partially thawed eggs out of the warming oven and broke them into the hot grease. While the eggs cooked, she tiptoed into the middle room and took from a row of boxes by the inside wall a quart jar of her precious sugar-sweetened preserves. She then took the meat and eggs from the skillet, and put in flour for gravy.

  Clovis wiped his razor, folded it, but frowned still at his face in the mirror. “I look like I’d been shaved with a cross-cut saw. Wouldn’t it be somethin now to have it like th people in Town—th electric lights an bathrooms.”

  Gertie poured milk over the browned flour, and frowned as she always did when she heard Clovis wish for some one of the wonders of Town. “Electric lights an runnen water won’t make a empty belly full,” she answered shortly. “I’ll bet they’s many a time Meg would ha traded her electric fer a week’s grub ahead, an her man made big money in th mines—when he got tu work.”

  “Meg’s seen a easier life than you,” he said, sorrow come back to his voice. “No heaven and sweaten fer her tu make corn grow in land that ud be better left in scrub pine an saw briers, an then not keepen all you raise.”

  Gertie turned sharply away. In another minute she’d be telling him about the money she had, and of how she meant to buy the Tipton Place. Then he’d want the money for a bigger and better truck when he got out of the army, like the time he’d sold her heifer for tires. He might even want her to use up all his army pay, quit farming, and live in Town while he was gone. “It ain’t been so bad,” she said. “They’s a heap a people has seen it worse.”

  “I’d ought to ha give up a long time ago an a gone to Oak Ridge like Samuel, but you—an Mom, too—wouldn’t ever hear to it.”

  “But you allus said me an th youngens ud have to come too,” she reminded him. “An I ain’t a wanten to be like Meg, allus liven from hand to mouth.”

  “But she’s had it easier an her youngens has got good schools,” he insisted, carrying the lamp to the kitchen table. He sat down but did not help himself to food. He looked up at her, his eyes soft, shiny brown in the lamplight. “An anyhow, Gert, I’ve allus hoped you could have it nicer, way nicer’n Meg.” He looked at the plate of eggs and sowbelly she put in front of him, “You wasn’t raised to eat sowbelly in a tar-paper shack.”

  She poured coffee, set it by his plate. “Eat an quit carryen on so,” she said, her voice hoarse, angry-seeming. “Our youngens is learnen,” she went on in a moment. “An anyhow this settlement couldn’t hardly a got along without yer tinkeren; th grist mill an th mail—”

  “I wish to goodness you wouldn’t call it tinkeren,” he burst out, a spoonful of gravy lifted above his eggs. “In lots a places people that can fix machines as good as I can makes big money fer it—an I’d ought to ha gone off an got a job at it soon as times got good.”

  “Aw, Clovis,” she began, and stopped; she’d only say the same things she’d said so many times already when he looked longingly at some letter from the employment office in Town begging him to go to work in that powder plant in Indiana or Willow Run or some other place.

  He stirred the biscuit into his egg and gravy. “If I’d a gone off to work like I ought three years ago, th army mightn’t be a gitten me now, an you’d all be a heap better off.”

  “Mebbe not,” she said. “They could a got you anyhow, like they done Millie Neeley’s man—left her high an dry in Cincinnati where he’d got a job, an her not gitten enough frum him in th army to keep her an th youngens in a town, an nothen back home to come to. You won’t ever have to be a worryen on how me an th youngens’ull git along. I can manage.”

  “By doen work fitten fer a mule—an th youngens growen up knowen nothen but work,” he said. He took one bite of biscuit and egg and gravy, and got up. He picked up his cup of coffee, and stood finishing it, quickly, as he took the lid from the refilled tea kettle and tested the water. “It’s hot enough. I don’t want it bilen; it might crack th radiator, an I got all th holes fresh soddered up jist th other day.”

  Gertie was stooping by the oven door, two fresh biscuits held lightly between her tough fingers. “But ain’t you a goen to eat, Clovis? You’ve got plenty a time.”

  “I ain’t hungry,” he said, and took his coal-dust-, grease-stained mackinaw from its nail behind the kitchen door.

  “You ain’t a comen down with fever er somethen, not eaten thisaway?”

  He looked at her in hurt surprise. “Woman, a body don’t go off fer to be examined fer th war ever day. I wish you’d a got th youngens up.”

  “But it ain’t like you was a leaven fer true,” she said.

  “Mebbe not,” he said, sighing, buttoning his coat. “But all th same, it’s somethen like th enden a th beginnen.” He crooked one arm
and looked at the coat sleeve over it with sharp disgust. “Did you wash this thing, Gertie? It looks like a bitch had had her pups on it, an raised em there.”

  “I tried to,” she said apologetically, “but it’s old an th grease an coal dust wouldn’t come out.”

  “I wish t’goodness I’d a bought me a new jumper,” he complained. “It’s bad enough to go looken like a piece a pore white trash th’out bein’ dirty into th bargain.”

  “You’ll look jist as good as a lot a th rest, I bet,” she consoled him. “Looks ain’t everthing.”

  He rummaged through his pockets. “Oh, law, I’ve left my wallet on th dresser. Take this an th spring water, an let her be a kind a warmen up. Recollect to shut off that petcock—I drained her.”

  She took the flashlight from the high shelf and with the water went out to the truck, parked in the middle of the road at the top of a little rise so that the roll down might save cranking the motor. She set the kettle on the ground, knelt to search for the petcock, and only then turned on the flashlight, remembering as she always did when she saw its jabbing circle of light, how much it had cost and how Clovis was always having to buy batteries for it. Lantern light was cheaper, and she liked it better.

  She turned the petcock. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, she poured the warmish spring water into the radiator, then poured in a little of the hot from the tea kettle, mixing them so that the hot might not crack the metal or the cold freeze. She had emptied both vessels, and rushed to the spring and back for more water before Clovis came.

  As she poured in the last of the water, he gave her a hard quick hug, and a quick kiss that might have touched her lips had she not at that moment turned her head to see about the radiator cap.

  He sprang in, twisted together the ignition wires, then as Gertie jerked out the rocks that wedged the wheels, he stepped on the clutch. She gave a push and the truck rolled away, slowly at first, then faster. She stood, bucket and tea kettle in hand, listening, watching. If it didn’t start she’d have to go help him crank; but when the truck was hardly three-quarters of the way down she heard the cough and then the shivering roar. Still, she did not turn immediately away, but watched the black shadow of the truck pushing a weak blob of yellow light ahead. She watched it climb the rise, go along the level space of the ridge crest, turn onto the gravel, then down again. The black shadow was gone; only the sound was left, smothered by the hill, a lonesome going-away sort of sound, different from the noise of the truck’s coming home.

  She shivered, for the first time conscious of the cold.

  The shivers did not go away completely until she had sat with her feet in the oven door long enough to drink a cup of coffee. She frowned, considering the lamp. The flame was turned down almost to blueness, but still it wasted oil and smelled up the kitchen, and daylight was yet a long while away. She wished for a churning, some work she could do in the dark, but the cold snap had kept the clabber from souring. Her fingers longingly touched the knife in her pocket; while the children were asleep would be a good time to bring the back of the head out of the block of wood. It would make her feel better, the whittling, and the block of wood would be company. She got up quickly, lighted the lantern, and went off to the barn for the peck or so of corn she had sorted out to shell for hominy. Millions of men were gone in the dark, and their millions of wives couldn’t sit idle-handed and wait for daylight.

  Later, she was glad she had hit upon the hominy making. The work helped keep the children busy, with less time for troubling over Clovis. It was hardly daylight before Enoch came running into the kitchen, half awake like a child in nightmare, crying that his pop had gone off to war and he hadn’t kissed him good-bye. He wakened the others, and tenderhearted Clytie began to cry, so that Gertie must make a little lie and tell them that Clovis had kissed them all in their sleep before he left. “It ain’t like he was gone fer true,” she told them. “He’ll be back, mebbe as early as midnight.”

  Cassie’s eyes were doubtful as she said: “But, recollect, you told us Uncle Henley, he’d be back. An Granma said he warn’t never a comen back—never no more till th judgment day. Never,” she repeated, staring at her mother with her big-pupiled eyes, as if her mother’s face might hold some answer to this new riddle of never.

  “But your pop, he’ll be all right,” Gertie said, her voice loud, insistent.

  The children left off their crying and their questions, but she could not wipe the doubt from their faces. She was glad when the silent, scantily eaten breakfast was done, and enough daylight had come that she could go do the morning’s chores in the barn. There, the cow and the mule and the fattening pig did not know that Clovis was gone.

  In spite of the clear sunny weather and the pleasant bustle of hominy making, the children complained much of the length of the day. At noon only Amos was hungry, and though Gertie quarreled at them all for having eaten so much half raw hominy corn they couldn’t eat their proper victuals she knew it wasn’t the skinned hominy corn that filled their bellies, but the same thing that filled her own.

  More than once through the long day, when the shadows of the house seemed fixed on the ground, she thought of the block of wood. Once, during the middle of the afternoon, she found herself kneeling by it, knife open in her hand. She sprang up, ashamed of her time-wasting ways, and went back to the hominy corn, bubbling through its last boil in a lard can on the kitchen stove. A pale finger of the low autumn sun had come at last through the kitchen window. She watched it as she stirred the hominy, but so slowly did it widen, so slowly did it move, that it seemed a dead thing, a differently colored strip of paper pasted on the wall. The band of light gave no brightness to the smoke-grimed building paper, faded into a dull red, but lay pale and sad, sadder than any sunlight she could remember.

  There was no need, she told herself, to stand and stir the hominy like it was apple butter about to stick. Seemed like, though, it was the only thing she could think to do. She stirred and stirred and stared at the shelf on the wall behind the stove and at the wash bench by the kitchen door. They looked strange today, different, somehow, from the way they had looked yesterday.

  The hominy was through the last boil long before milking and night work time. A moment’s terror came down on her as she wondered how she could keep busy until time to go to the barn. She was standing on the porch searching out the children, who had gone walnut gathering to the far side of the field, when her eyes happened upon the great pile of knotty dead chestnut chunks she and Reuben had sawed last week. Clovis, she remembered, had quarreled when she and the boys had snaked it up out of old John’s woods. Sure, Clovis had complained, the chinchy old skinflint would give them that for stove wood; if they did wear themselves out and saw it up nobody could ever split it, he had said. She smiled as she took the single-bladed splitting ax and the heavy white oak maul from their porch corner. Tomorrow morning, she told herself, she’d show Clovis her pile of split wood.

  She selected what appeared to be a perfectly level spot, picked up an especially knotty, two-foot-wide cut of the dead chestnut, and put it there. She lifted the ax, held it an instant, searching out with her eyes the exact center of the wood. She sent the ax deep into the wood at the chosen spot. Then, with one blow of the maul, she buried the ax blade. She waited an instant for the crackling sound of splitting wood, and when none came she took the blunt-edged triangular froe, and holding it with one hand tapped it into the chunk of wood with the maul, careful to keep the sinking froe in line with the ax. As soon as the froe was firm in the wood, she raised the maul high in both hands and, bending a little, swung it in a high wide arc, bringing it down with such force that the block of wood sank a little into the earth and the head of the froe flattened somewhat.

  The children straggling home with sacks of walnuts gathered round to watch. Now and then they gave cries of encouragement, and always shouts of joy as each chunk came apart. All were troubled, even Clytie, who hated all outdoor work, when one of the blocks swallowe
d both ax and froe and still showed not even a crack. Gertie sent Enoch running for the old iron wedge she’d used when she made rails to mend the fence. Hardly was it driven halfway in when the chunk gave up and came apart.

  When the last chunk was quartered, she went to the house for a drink, and saw with something close to despair that the house shadow on the eastern side was still a hand’s breadth away from the palings of the garden fence. She shook her head over the earliness of it, but all the same went on to the barn. There, she took heads of cane from the pile in one of the stables, and sitting on the low log sill, used a length of old crosscut saw and raked the cane seed down into her apron, dropped sack-like between her outspread legs. The fat hens, gentle as were all her animals, came pecking into her apron with quick out-thrustings of their heads. One, saucier than the others, stood on Gertie’s knee and pecked at the head of cane. “Git away, you feisty girl,” she said, and when the hen did not move, except to turn her head and look at her, she scolded in mock anger: “I’ll bet you didn’t lay me a egg today neither. An eggs is better’n three cents a piece, my girl.”

  The hen jumped away; and Gertie, looking after her, thought she had spoken unkindly, for with her bright comb, big wide behind, and neat slender legs she looked to be a good layer. She smiled on them all when she gathered the eggs—thirty-one that day. At this rate she could easily put another dollar in her pocket this week. Another dollar? For what? It was still like a sudden awakening from heavy sleep, each time it came to her that she had money enough for the land. Dollars now could go for other things—dishes, grass seed, new shoes for Cassie?

  When she had put in more corn for the fattening pig and listened toward the house to make certain the children were all right, she walked across last year’s cornfield. She stopped on its highest knoll to listen for Lizzie’s bell. She heard at last the faint faraway tinkle that told her Lizzie had broken through the old fence and gone to the steep, wooded banks above the creek. Dock, of course, was with her, for he and Lizzie were great friends, one always lonesome without the other.