Now in November

by Josephine W. Johnson

  5

  THOSE years went slowly for us. Slow because heavy with the weight of things done, and the greater weight of things unfinished and still to be learned. The seasons washed one into another and were never still, but there was no swiftness nor anything but calm and gradual change. Sometimes not even that, but a shifting back and forth of seasons . . . long stretches of rain in the December mud, and a wind like April over winter snow . . . late pea-vines springing up at Thanksgiving, and marsh-violets in the sleet, and at times the orchards would be white in autumn, the trees wasting their strength before the spring. And there was the double life, the two parts not within each other nor even parallel. The one made up of things done day after day with comfort and soberness, hard sometimes but solid—things you could lay your hands on and feel that they were there: the saucepans and heavy dishes, the thick cups and the five beds to be made—things without any more mystery than the noon sun had. The open life and the one that was greater of the two, calm, prosaic . . . rational. And there was the inner walking on the edge of darkness, the peering into black doorways . . . the unrevealed answer which must be somewhere, and yet might not be even present or hidden in that darkness . . . this under-life which when traced or held to was not there, and yet kept coming back and thrust up like an iron dike through the solid layers of the sane and understood. The moment of self-searching, of standing under the oaks at night and asking—What? Who? What am I? . . . and the moment of feeling the self gone, lost or never existent. Where am I, God? . . . the terrible desire to understand . . . the moment of realization that there are some things that are neither bad nor good, nor ever to be classified . . . the strangeness that Kerrin had . . . things that like shards of a meteorite imply the presence of worlds beyond comprehension or understanding. And there was the desire for source—the desire to understand cause, which is the heart-root of religion, and led the mind through such devious and dark tunnels, and brought it out nowhere. These years marked by the dark torment of adolescence—that time when a fallen nail unlifted or a tuft of sheep’s wool is torture at night with fear and accusation. When dreams are portent or promise, and there is meaning and symbol in the crossing of two branches or a shadow’s length. . . . But all the time in the back of these things there was the hill-quiet and the stony pastures, and sometimes they made me ashamed of being what I was—human and full of a thousand wormy thoughts and selfishness, but more often they were like hands to heal.

  6

  IN MARCH of this year—ten years since the day we came—there were tin-grey clouds and cold winds, and the white ash of orchard fires was blown east and scattered. But no rain had come since the first of February. “This year will have to be different,” I thought. “We’ve scrabbled and prayed too long for it to end as the others have.” The debt was still like a bottomless swamp unfilled, where we had gone year after year, throwing in hours of heat and the wrenching on stony land, only to see them swallowed up and then to creep back and begin again. I felt sure somehow that this year would end differently and better, and not be merely a shift of seasons that left us still bound and waiting. We had gone too long in a fog of hope.

  My father’s life had been a sort of fierce crawling to rid us of debt before that time when even the effort would be too heavy for him. He wanted some safety for us, freedom from that fear and doubt he had always known himself. And he wanted time to look around and be still. He loved the land in a proud, owned way,—only because it was his, and for what it would mean to us; not in the way that Merle and I did, and still do. To us it was a thing loved for its own sake, giving a sort of ecstasy and healing (high words, but even they are too pale), and we felt a nameless, not wholly understood love. But the land was all Father’s life then. The whole weight of his ambition, the hope and sanity of his mind rested on the same ground he walked. This heavy, complaining labor with doubtful profit was almost the only visible sign of love he had ever showed us. But it was one that I’d never doubted.

  Father was like Kerrin in that he couldn’t see the masterpiece of a maggot or be satisfied with the shadow of a leaf, in which ways we were older than he was, but young in being so blind we could not see the heaviness of his responsibility or know the probe of that fear which made him want security at the expense of our happiness.—I think sometimes that he would have been a milder, more patient man had there been some sons instead of nothing but girls’ talk all the time and women-voices. Life’s lonely enough and isolated enough without the thick wall of kind to make it go even darker. Later we did not talk so much, but in the first years we were like a bunch of guineas, cackling and squawking at all hours. It irritated him to have us picking and pecking at lives of other people, and telling the things we’d heard. “Shut up!” he’d shout.—“Shut up and keep out of others’ business!” And at times we had hated him for it. He felt too that we blamed him because there was nothing left but this land out of everything he had piled together for years; but the truth was that we never thought about this, and were glad that the place was old and stony and full of uncleared woods. Nor did Mother blame him either in word or mind. The only place she wanted to be was where Father was, whether this place was Eden or Sheol itself, and what form it took didn’t matter much. But he was so raw in mind himself that he suspected us all.

  We never seemed able to make much over. All that we saved above what it cost to live—and live by mouth and mind only, with nothing new but the seasons or thoughts we had—all went into the mortgage-debt. It would have taken so little to make us happy. A little more rest, a little more money—it was the nearness that tormented. The nearness to life the way we wanted it. And things that have cost more than they’re worth leave a bitter taste. A taste of salt and sweat.

  The spring crept up slowly this year; tide-like receded. Green crosiers of the ferns again and the mandrakes humping up like toadstools in the grass. I got tired as a rag sometimes and would not have minded being run through with a locust thorn and left for the shrikes to pick at. What use all this in the end? The hope worn on indefinitely . . . the desire never fulfilled . . . four o’clock and the ice-grey mornings . . . the cows and dark . . . the cans enormous in the foggy lamplight . . . day come up cold and windy . . . Max sullen as a red clod . . . the endless cooking . . . the sour rim of pails . . . Father’s grey shirts soaking all day in water. . . . There seemed no answer, and the answer lay only in forgetting.

  But the days were warm sometimes. Spring came first to the air, and then to the life of things. The elm trees were green like sulphur smoke, or dust from a dry old fungus-ball; the wild ginger hard-packed still on its roots, but green with a silver mold, and in the ravine I found a moccasin snake coiled and hating, while the cold spring water flowed over his skin, over and over until I grew almost chilled with seeing it. The ground was hard. Things struggled up with their heads bent over. Father began to plough, and cut farther into the woods this year. Acres of wild phlox turned to corn. There was no use to say anything. Not even Merle did any more. Four trees came down, two pin-oaks and some sycamores, and the oaks had a queer and oily smell. No peaches this year. Blossoms stuck scrappily, one or two on a branch; but the apple buds were thick, and the pear trees covered. “A good year,” we said, “—if nothing happens.” (I wondered if anywhere on earth men could say such and such will be, with certainty. No farmer ever could.) One good year and the land would be ours again. I could imagine life free of this weight, so wonderful that only to be alive would be in itself enough. But hope was all we had then; not even belief—unless hope so strong and obstinate that nothing can root it out is called a faith.

  It was queer how little rain came that month, and we thought that the next would bring a flood.

  7

  WHEN Kerrin’s school closed in April this year, I dreaded the thought of her being home all day. It seemed to me even then, eight months ago, that there was something more inerasably wrong with her than just a fierce selfishness and discontent. This teaching only held back awhile the blac
k tide of something that had its beginning with her birth. Four years after we came, she had started to teach at the Union County school, although she was only nineteen then and there were some on the board who said it was wrong to have her even as only a substitute for Ally Hines. It wasn’t her age they minded so much, but we never had joined the church; and there was some talk of her “not being the one for the place,” but it dwindled into a mild nothing. Kerrin was good as a teacher and worked much harder than Ally Hines, with her cancerous bones and cough, had ever been able to. Ally had come down sick in the middle of the year, and Kerrin had asked for the place herself. The board would never have thought or considered her of their own accord, but when they heard she was through with high school, which was all that Ally herself had done, they took her for lack of knowing what else to do and being confused with Ally’s sickness as a thing not reckoned on in their almanacs. We were glad, not only because of the money—which Kerrin kept to herself, knowing it gave her a kind of power even though she might have to lend it sometime,—but glad because it took her away from home.

  Even when she was quiet or reading, I could never find rest where Kerrin was. None of us could. Only out in the fields was there any peace when she was at home. I would come in the house sometimes and, without seeing or hearing, know she was there, and know too when she was gone without hearing her go. No matter in what sort of mood she was—and there were times when Kerrin was almost fiercely happy and kind—the tautness was never gone, the fear of what she might say or do.

  She made a good teacher, good because she understood all those lumpy children in so far as any but God could understand them, I guess, and held them all to her with a kind of hard leniency and discipline. She succeeded because she really cared about them and thought it important that they should know the states and the laws and the years in which things happened or died, although not caring if she forgot it all forever, herself. She believed that for some reason it was important and valuable for them to know 1066 and the mystery of square root, and never asked herself exactly why and so was able to teach them well and thoroughly. There’s a driving force—an energy lying in blindness—which is never known by those wondering and open-minded ones who are led by thought into doubt, and from there through all the stages of futility and despair until they are paralyzed to point out one way or the other even to children who haven’t the sense to sneer. But Kerrin, who riddled all laws herself, took a fanatic delight in shoving down law and order into their placid throats, amiably open wide and gaping. The children loved her, and sometimes she brought them home after school, one or two at a time, for no reason except that they asked her to. If they were little boys that came, Father would stop his work and come up to talk with them in an eager, hearty way, pointing out the pig houses or the water-pump by the pond, and laugh at whatever they said, no matter whether their words were smart or foolish. Kerrin herself liked the boys better because their faces were not so stupid and their minds clicked faster. The girls were already vacant wives, she said,—not stolid, their tongues slapping around like wheels, but already bounded tight with convention, a thick wall between them and the unknown things; nor was it in Kerrin to see and point out a way, or break a hole that these children could nose through and escape. “—Hillbillies and tenant farmers,” she said. “No Lincoln’ll ever come out of these. Smart enough to be even school-teachers, maybe, repeating the things they’ve read. Why should I try for more? They only want to know enough so they can clerk in a store some place and ride in a Ford on Sundays. Want to be able to read the magazines and catalogues. If they’re looking for more, they can go some place else and get it!—And none of them ever will. . . .”

  It was true and it wasn’t true—what she said about the children. People weren’t born and fastened to earth any more. They came and went, returning and leaving, not like a tide but in scattered ways and times. People came back to the land as we had come, after years of another life, bringing with them a newness to old things, a different seeing from the sight of men born with the sound of calves’ bawling in their ears and the taste of mud in their mouths from the beginning. There was no solitude utterly unpierced, no isolation complete any longer—except for the final one of self. If Kerrin had chosen to point out the myriad facets of life, the strangeness of breath itself, she might not have left them so blind and narrow, even if they had been as indifferent as she thought. But maybe she herself didn’t see these things, and was blind and gaping, too, which made her restless and full of uncertain angry moods, and above all lonely.

  I hoped that this year she would find enough work to keep her quiet, and wished that August with schools beginning was not so far, although God knows we needed her help enough. She had been of more use to Father than even she herself realized, and things had taken him twice as long while she was away at school. He was slow and fumbled the harness, jerked and thumped at the horses until they pounded the walls. Kerrin used to do it all for him, shoving the bits in swift and angry, but with no hesitation or fumbling tries. A sort of contemptuous certainty. She used to feed them at noon and toss in corn, kind and yet viciously, damning their eagerness. The stalls got muck-deep and moldy when she was gone, and Father left them because there was little time. But this year when school closed, she seemed to forget all the things she used to do, and it was only by nagging that we made her work.

  I wished that all the strength which she spent in hate and in searching for something she did not even name to herself had been ours to use. But I knew that strength alone would never have helped us much, and even if we had raised nine farms we would have had less than an acre’s return in money. Kerrin herself never cared whether or not this slough of debt was filled, and to her the land was only a place to stay in, and as lonely as peaks or islands are.

  She spent most of her time now, as she used to do when we were children, reading—it seemed, almost everything that was piled up there on the shelves. She would lie with her hard brown face casting a shadow on the page, and go through the books that the grandfathers used to own—old books that had page after page without a new paragraph or picture, and filled with philosophies obscure and gloomy as were the bindings, but even more durable perhaps. She spent hours in reading them over and did not stop, as Merle and I did, at a certain page or time, or stop to do dishes and scrabble in earth to make a garden. She was never law or time bound, or thinking of how her eyes might hurt; and she had a faith that was almost religious in believing a thing must be so if a man would bother to write it out seriously and bind it in a book.

  Even if we had had more money, I doubt that Kerrin would have been satisfied. She carried the root of her unrest with her, a root not the kind that pushed the self on and up to accomplishment and fed it with a desire, but a poisoned thing that wasted its strength in pushing down here and there, and found only a shallow soil or one full of rocks wherever planted. I knew that she wanted love,—not anything we could give her, frugal and spinsterly, nor Father’s (having long ago stopped even hoping for it), but some man’s love in which she could see this image she had of herself reflected and thus becoming half-true. I knew it was this fierce restlessness, this desire and hunger that had led her—even after teaching school all day, and carrying up milk at night, and finishing all those things accumulated and undone as though tipped there from the day like a rubbish heap of the hours’ leavings—to go out fox-hunting at night with the farmers, or walk alone, tramping the marsh grass and weeds or along the dim rutted roads until morning. I would crouch cold on these nights in bed or at the window, driven by some obsession to see her come and go, and could not sleep until the empty moon-patch on her bed was broken and I could see the light on her bony and polished arms.

  I felt empty and thirsty, too, sometimes, dreaming wild and impossible dreams, but was driven easily from them by the pattern of a shadow or a pot on the stove, and driven from them too by a wry sense of humor that made my mind leap always to see the vision’s end. Not even on April nights heavy with
grape smell, or in the moving of shadow-leaves could my mind forget the inevitable noon.

  8

  ON FATHER’S birthday this year, I walked up near to the old stone fence where we’d buried Cale. Merle and I had piled some of its rocks in a sort of cairn on top of his grave, and planted wild ginger there. We used to see Kerrin going up this hill-path sometimes, and once, years ago, we found her crying on top of the cairn and sneaked away, pretending not to see. It seemed queer to us who had never cried afterward but had loved him so much when alive—much more than she had, we thought. But now I’m not sure of it.—Kerrin had a strange way of not seeming to notice things or care about them, but years later we’d find the feeling was there, living and fierce, under a thin slab of indifference.

  The stones were toppled over and wrenched apart by roots, but the wild ginger still covered it like the leaves of enormous ivy. I saw Kerrin down on the road below me, and wondered if she would come here to the cairn. She was curiously sentimental in some ways and played small parts for her own sake even when no one could see her, and it would have been like her to come here on this day. She went on past to the barn, though, and did not look up or turn.

  We did not celebrate Father’s birthday any more, but I would have liked to bring him back something from the woods, some foolish thing like a bud or stone, to make him know that I had remembered the day. But it was hard to give trivial things, and I wondered if after all I was glad that he was born and had any reason to make the day seem a special thing. If I had spent money for a present he would have been anxious over the cost and suspicious as always, demanding to know where it came from, and seeing the farm sold under our feet for the sake of a ten-cent tie.