Now in November

by Josephine W. Johnson

  We let this day go by without saying much, and I think he himself had forgotten the meaning of it; but there was one thing at least this year that set it apart again from other days.

  Father came up tired that night while Merle was peeling potatoes, cutting the skins off thick and stoutly, her mind full as always of some strange thing she had thought or memorized, and not noticing what she did. He smiled at her absently, more out of habit left from the days when she was small and her hair stood up rough and matted like weedy grass behind, than from any feeling of kindliness left now. He turned toward Mother and threw his hat on the table, mopped at his damp and rutted face. “Max isn’t coming back,” he said. “It seems not to pay to work for me!” He looked at Mother as if it were she who had driven Max off or else had failed through some fault to hold him here.

  It wasn’t his bitter voice she noticed, though, or even the blame. All her concern was for the meaning of what he’d said. What it would mean to him and Max. “What’s the matter, Arnold?” she asked. “What’s wrong with Max?” She saw him sick, hurt to death, wagon-pitched and already dying. She lived in the lives of others as though she hadn’t one of her own.

  “Nothing’s wrong with Max,” Father said. “He’s gone where he’ll get more pay. Gone to do road-work, and left me flat. I paid him for ploughing and was going to do corn on shares. I ain’t the money to pay a man for that. Someone’ll have to do it on shares.”

  “Maybe you could sell it,” Mother said. “Pay someone to help and sell the corn this fall.”

  Father laughed. A sound more like a snort or sneer, as though he were glad to have her mistaken. “If it’s good,” he said, “so’ll everyone else’s be. Land’ll be drowned in corn.—How’s a man to know?” he burst out, exasperated. “You ought to be able to sell all the stuff you raise! Somebody needs it. A farm ought to pay as good as a road. No road’s going to feed a man!” He looked old—old and childish at the same time. As if he might burst out crying soon. It was awful—the rage he felt; but it wasn’t the anger so much as the despair that made us afraid.

  “Maybe Christian Ramsey could come,” Mother suggested. She put out the words with doubt, feeling her way along his mind.

  “Christian’s swamped under now. Got all his creek-bottom full. What’d he do with ten acres more?” He slapped the words at her raw.

  “Grant Koven might do it then,” Mother said. She knew that nothing was ever as overwhelming or final as he seemed to think,—that if he would wait, instead of shouting, there’d be less to shout over in the end.

  “No,” Father said. He shoved her suggestions away as though they were stupid thoughts that had come to him hours ago and been found of no use. He stared at his hands. Sullen and tired, the anger going out. Then he jerked his head toward Merle, saw the potatoes half-peeled with their skins still patched around, and asked when supper was going to be. “If you’d have it any time soon,” he muttered, “I’d make it over to Kovens’ tonight.”

  I was glad that Kerrin didn’t come in that time. She made it a point to stay away, out in the barns or field, till supper was ready; and sometimes didn’t come even then, but ate by herself, secret and ravenously. She would scoop the syrup of sweet potatoes out of the dish with her hands, and wipe out the roasting-pan with pieces of bread hacked off and ragged. Father stopped asking about her after a while and looked at her doubtfully when she did come in, suspecting her of some hidden reason. I never got used to his sick impatience, and felt racked all the time with hate and pity. Even before, when we were younger, I’d sit and watch him sometimes at the table, when he sat there eating and leaving things on his plate and not saying much, with the tired look on his face that made me want to cry at times, although I was quick to hate him when he would turn on us suddenly and shout out: “Eat your dinner, you girls! Stop messing with your food!” But all the time I would feel us there on his shoulders, heavy as stone on his mind—all four of our lives to carry everywhere. And no money.

  Kerrin said once he made her think of the mad King Lear, and wondered if after all the daughters were wholly wrong. “He was a wild old man and half-mad already. How could they reason with one like that?” she’d ask. She read the play with a sort of gloomy pleasure, and memorized pages off by heart—mostly the cold and rational words of Goneril, and then, more for the sound than anything else, the howling of Edgar on the heath. I was glad that she wasn’t here, watching and thinking about him, this time while Father sat at the table and drummed with his fingers on the cloth, not hungry but tired and impatient. When supper was done, he left for the Kovens’ early.

  I had never seen Grant, but Merle had, a long time ago when she was still little and he came through hunting a horse he’d lost. She didn’t remember much except that the one he rode was tired, and he left it out by the barn, going away on foot. She gave it some water, and when he came back he took what was left and washed off its head and sides. His hands were as big as shovels, she said, but hadn’t noticed much else. Kerrin would have remembered everything; she’d have remembered even the things he wore and whatever he’d said and a lot that he didn’t say. Grant was about thirty-one, Mother said, and had been away from home for five years, working on ranches and in the mines after he’d finished school, but had come back now to his father’s place. Bernard Koven had been a minister once, then he bought this land of his and went back to farming while he still had a tithe saved up and breath to make use of it. They owned only pasture land, not fit for much but mullein plants and grazing, and kept both steers and hogs. They did no dairying, or any of all those things that Father had started and was breaking his back to keep on doing—each by itself too much for one man alone.

  I went down to the wood-pond by myself that night. It was cold and windy. Too cold almost for rain. The frogs sang loud enough to deafen, but stopped dead when I came. They sounded like old women cackling in the water. I stopped to listen, but could think of nothing except whether or not Grant would come, and wondered if he would be a man like Father. It was hard to think of another kind, and yet harder to think of him as young. It seemed strange, too, that we would have someone different to live with us, a person with knowledge that was taught, and one who had gone beyond this county and state, learning things by sight instead of just reading about them. Father had done this, too, but now it was as though these ten years of farming had blotted out all that was behind, and he was only a little different from those around us—the Ramseys and Huttons and Mayers who knew a great deal but saw it only from this one land-bound side.

  It was miserably cold. Ground even at the pond-edge hard. No spring about anything, and even the wild plums dim like a dirty web. I felt excited, though, and full of a kind of nameless hope. This year, I thought, will be different . . . better.

  I stood there long enough for the frogs to think I had gone, and they started up again, grunting and rumbling a long way apart;—and then came the shrill, insane chorus, thrust up like spears of sound, but guttering away again into a silence.

  9

  I WONDERED a lot about Grant in those days before he came. Merle seemed only mildly interested, though, and hoped that he wouldn’t eat very much. Kerrin said nothing at all about him and may not even have known that he was to come. She was never around when things were told, and then acted as if we had a conspiracy of silence against her. Once in those days I had a strange thought when I looked at Kerrin.—I thought that if I could look like her and know that nothing could ever change it—not sickness nor fear nor accident nor age, nor anything—that I should not care very much what happened, that nothing would worry me any more. Kerrin was beautiful in a dark, odd way, and made with a brown cold skin tight-stretched, and wild colty eyes. She would stand sometimes turning her face before the mirror, or spread her hands out through her hair that was more like a thick red light than anything real. She’d crane and stretch her neck to see how the light looked smooth and syrupy over her cheeks, and it seemed sort of sad to me at times that all her lovelines
s was going to waste on just us, with none but a few shy stumbling fellows to see her, or farmers already married.

  I felt little and mean in envying her and in wanting a beauty that nothing could ever change. I could not acknowledge it even to myself, but it was so. I used to wonder how men who had murdered or done crude and slimy things could go on living with the self which had made them do it still inside like a worm or ulcer; but now I could see how simple it was to make excuses.—How amazingly kind and tolerant we are to ourselves! What infinite patience we have!

  I went and looked at my face in the glass. There was something wrong and dull in the lines of it. A pale smear with no life in the skin, and a mouth like a cut across. I was plain—O God, so plain! But still I had seen homelier people than I, and not minded them so much—loved some, in fact. I tried to console myself with this, but remembered that they had strong faces, though. We—I—seemed like a disease on earth compared with the other things. Our lives, buildings, our thoughts even, a sort of sickness that earth endured. These were grotesque and morbid broodings, but they came back often in the unbearable cleanness of this spring.

  There were other things, though, more in the mind than these which the coming of Grant had brought, and sometimes even the scratch of Kerrin’s return was forgotten in the sight of green elms and the ghost-green of new sycamore leaves. The poplar catkins opened down from the top branches first, and looked like red squirrel-tails swinging. The top sheaths fell while the lower branches were still in bud, and their wax-yellow beaks lay on the grass. I wished we could live on the sight of these things (it would be a lot cheaper, Merle said), but they were only a part and could not satisfy everyone. Most people have the blindness of new-born things—a not-incurable blindness, the sight being there but its use not known. But to Merle and me, even when we had first come, it seemed that our hearts must be small and shriveled-up things since they felt so tight and full with only an eye’s breadth of loveliness to hold, and we wondered if they would grow or burst by the year’s end, what with having to hold all the nights and days and seasons, the change from hour to hour, and the change from minute to minute even, from cloud-shadows moving up and down the hills.

  In those early years, to read and to eat and to be alive on the hills had been enough for Merle and me. From the beginning we had felt rooted and born here, like the twin scrub-oak trees that grew together in the north pasture and turned lacquer-red in fall, and whose roots were under the white ledgestones. We called them the Gemini, and their inner branches grew short and were locked together so that the shape of both made only one tree with two boles.

  At no hour did life suddenly change, nor was there any moment which could be said to have altogether made or altered us. We were the slow accretion of the days, built up, like the coral islands, of innumerable things.—The moment of evening air between the stove and the well outside . . . the sound of wind wrenching and whining in the sashes . . . the flesh of corn-kernels . . . fear—fear of the lantern’s shadow . . . fear of the mortgage . . . cold milk and the sour red beets . . . the green beans and the corn bread crumbling in our mouths . . . fear again . . . and the voice of Kerrin singing to herself in the calf lot . . . the sense of safety in Mother’s nearness . . . the calm faith that was in her and came out of her like a warmth around . . . the presence of each other and a lusty love of being, of living and knowing there was tomorrow and God knows how many more tomorrows and each a life and sufficient in itself. . . . We were added to by the shadow of leaves, and by the leaf itself . . . by the blue undulations across the snow, and the kingfisher’s rattling scream even when creeks were frozen over. We were the green peas, hard and swollen, which Merle gathered late so that what was earth in the morning would be gone into and swelling out the peas by night, making them bigger all through no trouble or expense of ours, which seemed an odd, almost too kind thing—like a miracle when none was asked. They were as much part of us as the sight of white-boned sycamores flung up against the sky, or clouds driven like steam along the tops. In the thought and the strangeness of self we could spend hours as traveling through a labyrinth, and it was a riddle sufficient in those days to keep the mind quick and seeking, hungry and never fed; and in the mystery of the turnip, you forgot the turnip-leaf.

  But for Kerrin these things had never been satisfying enough, even in other years. She used to get restless and savage, and rode out long ways into the night while we sat reading. “Where’s Kerrin?” Father would keep on asking, would read a chapter and go peer out into the moonlight. “Why don’t you keep her home, Willa?” he’d say to Mother. “How do you know what she’s doing out this way? No girl ought to be out at night this way!” He’d be tired by dark, wanting to sleep early, wanted to go to bed by eight sometimes but insisted on staying up till Kerrin came back along the road, sometimes as late as nine or ten. We’d hear the plough-horses whinny and go thundering down the fence, and then the sorrel’s feet rattle the road stones a fourth of a mile away, and hear his shrill, exhausted neighing. “She’s here now,” Mother would say. “She’s safe enough. You go to sleep now, Arnold.” And with the nearer rattling of stones and feet, Father would close his book, for a half-hour now unread, and go upstairs, having learned that he could not meet or say anything to her, and remembering the one night when she first had stayed this late and he had gone storming out to meet her, shouting for explanations he never got, and made inarticulate with rage when she would not answer or come into the house. She had spent the night out in the barn that time, sleeping up in the weedy hay and more comfortable perhaps than we were, sick and unsleeping in our beds.

  I remember the morning after that night.—It was April, and cold, walled in with mists high as the sheep-barn roof. We saw Kerrin come out of the barn with dry scraps of weed still stuck in her hair, and stretch and yawn in the sun that came down through the mists, then come up the stones to the kitchen when Dad had gone. We looked at each other and shivered, but thought it was because of the fog that clung to our clothes and made them damp and chilly. We came down into the kitchen and flapped their dampness in front of the fire, and Kerrin sat at the table without saying anything, and the hay still messed in her hair. Her legs were wet and goose-fleshed from walking up in the grass. She watched us to see what we would say, but we only went on drying our clothes, more interested in the thick bacon smell and the glunk of oatmeal on the stove. Mother brought her some bacon and a hunk of toast and milk that had cream still marbled on the top, and told her she’d better move up against the stove to dry; and we could see she was hoping that Father would stay out a good long time. Kerrin ate savage and hugely like a wolf, and smeared on jelly till all her toast was gone, then ate the jelly plain in high, quivering spoonsful from the jar. Merle and I sat there and ate patiently at our blobs of oatmeal with milk around the edges. It came to me as a sort of dim, unfinished thought that there were hours of sun and hours of picking and hot hours on a stove all gone into those few minutes of Kerrin’s swallowing and would become part of her, giving her energy to hate and use loud words and tears; and I wondered how Mother’s faith would answer that, for it seemed to make the pattern of things more distorted than before. I hadn’t time to follow this thought to the end—which was well, perhaps, for there was no answer, at least none that I could have found—for Father came in just then and stood in the doorway looking at us.

  He was a big man and heavy, and his face hung dragged in long thin folds. His red hair used to be thick, but was now sparse and grown in somber hummocks. Once he had let it grow down over his collar, which made him look like a preacher and more kindly, but most of the time he was shaved and alien-looking to the earth. He had frosty eyes—a kind of white-blue with fierce pupils. I loved him sometimes when he smiled; because he so seldom did, I guess. He cared most for Merle and me, partly because we loved the land more, which seemed to justify and comfort him in a way. Merle he loved most, and used to say that she would have made a good boy. But he did not try to treat her as one, thinking th
at nothing could change a girl much. He looked at us from across the misty gulf that he thought was between him and all women, and thought of the place in which they moved around and did things as a long way off—a place from which they might step across this gulf to marry a man, but any time might go back again. Only Mother he saw clearly. The outside part of her anyway. If she went back in secret to this woman-place he did not know it, because marriage was to her a thing of which mighty few men are worthy—a religion and long giving.

  He seemed not to see or to have forgotten Kerrin, might not have noticed her at all if she’d kept still and combed her hair instead of leaving it strawed and weedy. “Max isn’t coming up today,” he said. “He’s sick.” He put the milk down slopping over the floor, and looked at Kerrin. He started to say something, but only got red and tight and turned around in a helpless, exasperated way. Mother asked him how much they had finished yesterday, and he said it wasn’t a third of what still was waiting. Max was slow, he muttered, and worked at home, besides—worked too much. . . . The Rathmans were planting corn, too. . . . Could silage it, anyhow, if it didn’t sell. . . .

  “Why don’t you grow something that nobody else has got?” Kerrin blurted out. “Something that’ll bring us more money than just corn!”

  “You want too much too fast,” Father said. He was cold and quiet and sounded years away from her nagging voice. He spoke as though to a little dog that insisted on yapping, a little dog that he might kick soon.

  I could see Mother watching him, screwed hard and tense, saying—be careful . . . be careful . . . don’t look at her that way! . . . Not aloud, but with her eyes. She was praying inside, I knew. Aloud she said, in a sort of indifferent way, that he might try celery later on, that it was hard to raise, she knew, but none around here had it and it took more water than anyone else had the time or means to give.