Now in November

by Josephine W. Johnson

  “Who’ll haul the water?” Dad asked. Less of a question than a sneer. He had the old look of tiredness on his face that came when we argued with him, that look of being harried and forced to fight back against things not worth the battle. A look of woman-tiredness.

  “I can do it,” Kerrin said. She looked excited and eager in a sudden flare. “Go ahead,” Father told her. “Go ahead and see what you can do!” He shoved back his chair and sat there laughing to himself. An unpleasant and meager sound, exasperated and turned in as if to some other man, invisible inside, who understood and pitied him. He seldom swore aloud, thought it was wrong to do before his girls;—but all the blasphemy was there, bursting and turning sour inside.

  Merle and I sneaked away and went out of the house. The mists were all risen and we could see down into the valley where the peaches were coming into bloom and flecked with skinny rose. They were sparse that year and thin-petaled, but the wild plums flowered in clouds. There was a lane of them back behind the barns, and we went there past the fresh dung-heaps steaming warm and the tall hogs that rooted in the mud. The old sow Clytemnestra stared at us dully with suspicion and muttered, and with her were nine hairy shoats, following where her great dugs trailed along the mud. The air came sweet and stale and full of a grassy smell. We felt that a hard, smothering weight was gone, and climbed the fence and started to run fast and blunderingly over the gopher field. We wanted to reach the woods and be hidden in it. Shut ourselves off in the sparse green shadows. The hollows were full of the wild thin pansies, blue as if frost or fog were laid there—acres, it seemed, and covering the ground thick as grass itself. We went up past the pond where already there were clusters of slimy eggs from the frogs and salamanders, transparent and round like a bunch of tapioca balls black-specked and stuck together. Merle picked up one in her hand but it slid away like a fat and slimy fish, and seemed almost to squirm. We waited and watched, but could find no frog swelled up to sing, and nothing that seemed alive but the whirling beetles that darted and left their streaks on water like the scratch of skates on ice. The white-oaks were in tassel then—but there is no way to tell of them. We only stood like a pair of stumps, and looked and thought that something would break inside, and we felt too stretched and heavy to hold much more. Then Merle went down on her knees in the grass and started to pull up the pansies, almost savagely and in great chunks. “There’re so many,” she said. “Nobody’ud miss them if I pulled a thousand!” And I pulled some, too, and it seemed to stop the hurt when you got your hands tight on them, even knowing that they would die. . . . We found a bat in the wild shadbushes, clung upside down like the body of some gigantic moth, and his gold-brown fur had a metal light. Glowed orange. We peered in the wild gooseberry bushes and saw the mayflies dance there like a dust of pollen, and under the crab-trees found the dead leaves move where something had burrowed a tunnel, but we could not see its face or know whether it might be mouse or mole. Then Merle said, “Look!” in a bursting whisper and pointed up at a black-oak, hollowed out with disease and carrying great swollen lumps of bark,—and I saw the cold stare of barred owl-faces. Young ones with stony eyes. I felt ready to burst with excitement, wanted to shout and yet was afraid to move: having hunted their nest since we first came, knowing it must be somewhere near and hearing the old ones call and hoot back and forth even in daylight and early evenings.

  I thought I was full enough of happiness to last for the rest of life, to cover forever after the things like that morning in the kitchen, the things that were warped and grew misshapen and made life seem like a nest of biting ants. And then it came to me as it did at times when the woods seemed all answer and healing and more than enough to live for, that maybe they wouldn’t be always ours—that a drouth or a too-wet year or even a year over-good when everyone else had too much to sell—could snatch them away from us, and a scratch on a piece of paper could cancel a hundred acres and all our lives. And this same sick fear came up again like a sly and smothering hand.

  “What’s the matter?” Merle wanted to know; and I think she could see the thoughts as though written plain on my broad smooth face, because she stood there chewing a twig, and all the inside light was gone out of her own. Above the fog of redbud trees and the wild plum, and across the moving sun-shadows, the buzzards went drifting on huge wings or rose up reluctantly from the brush, their red necks raw and sore-looking. And there was this same thought tunneling in both our minds.

  But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in. And as we were sane then and normal as the smooth face of a plate, the fear and the forgetting of it were balanced one against the other, and we no more brooded on this than the young calves would. We saw that the shadows were small and dwarfed by noon, and we were suddenly hollow with a hunger that no fear could make us forget or any wild ginger satisfy; and Merle hoped there would be muffins—big ones with hard tops; and muffins were more important and more wanted than all the hills on earth.

  10

  THIS is not all behind us now, outgrown and cut away. It is of us and changed only in form. I like to pretend that the years alter and revalue, but begin to see that time does nothing but enlarge without mutation. You have a chance here—more than a chance, it is thrust upon you—to be alone and still. To look backward and forward and see with clarity. To see the years behind, the essential loneliness, and the likeness of one year to the next. The awful order of cause and effect. Root leading to stem and inevitable growth, and the same sap moving through tissue of different years, marked like the branches with inescapable scars of growth.

  In the first years it had not been hard to forget, to go out and come back and to take things lightly, the shadows heavy but passed through and forgotten. But later it was never the same. The power of living in the moment, with the past days and the ones to come blotted out for a time, grew less in these ten years. Only Merle seemed in a way to keep an almost childlike pleasure in moments of happiness without thought of their end or their beginning. She had not changed much in the years. In her still this spring were two people parallel: the sound, sometimes acid sanity, lucid and healthy as her flesh; and with it this half-raw sensitiveness, a dark superstition and childish fear. She was so old and young as to be hard to understand, and yet curiously simple, too. She was honest as light itself and had what I’ve always wanted—courage to live by her beliefs. So much of our lives we go through edgewise, shield-carrying, half of our living a lie. In the moment of trial we keep back the two-edged truth and sheathe it again. I wish we were hard-mouthed, chary of praise, and all our lives saying only the things we think are so. In this way only can we have values or standards of any sort. Merle came near to this, not intentionally but by being born honest. She did not fight half-heartedly with faceless shadows, masked forms she was afraid to name, but knew things for what they were and twisted them apart. She seemed to deny in her living what I had always found true—that love and fear increase together with a precision almost mathematical: the greater the love then the greater fear is. Merle had hated the mortgage, but never feared it, even though loving the place as much, if not more, than I did. I thought that if ever we rid ourselves of the debt, it would be through her stubbornness and hate. It seemed that way in the spring at least. One liked to believe there was strength somewhere.

  11

  THEN on a cold dry day toward the middle of April, Grant came over. It was a day no different from the rest,—the earth green by then, crab-buds fiery red and the hawthorns opening out, but the ground was cracked with drouth, and things bent over in the effort of being born. I watched him come up the road, and Father went out to meet him. So little new ever happened in our lives that not even all that came after has blotched out his coming in my mind. There wasn’t much else to think of then.

  Grant was older than I had thought he would be, and seemed at first a cragged and strange-looking man. He was tall and thin and we found ourselves staring up at his f
ace like children. When he spoke his voice had a kind sound, almost old, and his smile was quick and sudden. He was embarrassed, we could see, but I noticed he had a quiet way of standing, not stiff and awkward like most men ill at ease. “He was scared and wanting to go,” Merle said afterward. “I could see him get red under all his tan.” But to me he had seemed very calm and patient.

  “I’m glad you’ve come, Mr. Koven,” Mother said. She spoke stiffly as though he were minister or sheriff, but she smiled and a person could see she meant it.

  “It’s good to have somebody new around,” Merle blurted out. “—Anything new.”

  Grant laughed then, a big hearty sound, and looked much younger. “You make it easy for me,” he said. “I’m glad that anything’s going to do.”

  Father didn’t know what to say and pretended not to hear him, and I only moved my head like an awkward stick when he told my name. Kerrin was not around. She wanted to meet him some way that was different from ours, preferring to choose her own time and place.

  “It’s going to be a good year this time,” Father said at last. It was what he always said when there seemed a need for words and none came. “It’s time for a big-crop autumn, and there’ll be more than even the lot of us can do.”

  “It’s time, God knows,” Grant answered. “We’re tired of feeding out husks instead of corn.”

  “A person gets worn out heaving the shocks around to find any ears,” Merle said. “And the ears aren’t fit for much but cob-houses.—Black smut and corn-boils. We didn’t dare look what we dumped to the steers. Just pretended that it was corn.”

  Grant grinned. “‘It’s the shape of corn, anyway,’ Dad used to tell his heifers, and after a while they began to believe it better.”

  “Stomachs must have shouted loud enough to cover up their eyes,” Merle said. “And when you’ve got seven—”

  “You come out to the barn now,” Father put in. “It’s late, and we got some work to do.” It was always late with Father, even at four in the mornings; I think that his sleep was a race between dark and light, and he lay with his boots a hand away on the chair beside him.

  “Dinner’ll be pretty soon,” Mother reminded him. She had planned a good meal because of Grant’s coming, and knew that Father delayed sometimes, forgetting to come unless she went out and told him. He got hungry, and cross because he was hungry, but didn’t think of the reason why.

  “You’re only new once,” Merle said to Grant. “—Only worth opening peaches for once. You’d better eat all you can now!”

  “Who’s buying peaches?” Dad wanted to know. He got red and flushed with suspicion, but Mother only laughed.

  “It’s a last year’s jar,” she told him. “Peaches you picked yourself.”

  Dad was embarrassed and walked away, and I wondered what Grant was thinking, and if he would get used soon to this hourly wrangling or if he had known it himself before.

  “It won’t take peaches to bring me in at noon,” Grant said. “Hog-greens taste good when you’re hollow enough.” He smiled at Mother and around at the rest of us very fast, and went out after Father.

  “He’ll eat a lot,” Merle said. “I can tell by the length that’s on him. We should never have planned to feed him here.”

  “This’ll be a good year,” Mother answered. “We’ll have food enough to eat anyway. Food enough if nothing to wear. We’ll fill him somehow.” She looked worried, though, and I saw her go back and recount the jars, as if by doing it over often enough she could make them more.

  “Enough to eat anyway” . . . food enough . . . the words kept nagging me with some memory of their own, though I’d heard them often enough for them to carry no meaning any longer. “You farmers have food . . . food at least. . . .” And then I remembered the man who had come here years ago, and the old terror came back—the fear of being cast out of even this last retreat.

  He had come in the fall of the year we moved, and the mortgage was even then like a rock that we carried always in our minds. There was a bitterness in sowing and reaping, no matter how good the crop might be (and that first year it was heavy as the oak mast and rich as weeds) when all that it meant was the privilege of doing this over again and nothing to show but a little mark on paper. And there was the need, the awful longing, for some sort of permanence and surety; to feel that the land you ploughed and sowed and lurched over was your own and not gone out from under your feet by a cipher scratch. I used to think of it sometimes when the orchards started to bloom and changed from a greyness into white fur along the plum branches, and a rose light came in the peaches. And I used to think of it when the apricots began to redden, and you could look down from the hog-lot’s edge into a valley full of white smoke, more like a gulf full of white spray, where the giant pear trees were. I’d scratch my nail along the post and I’d think—when somebody does like this on a scrap of paper, then all these things are gone, and a little scrawl is bigger than trees or valley. But the fear was worse and more heavy after the man had come.

  It was October then and we were carrying out sour milk to the chickens that morning, I remember, and we stopped by the fence-edge and saw him coming up the road. He came on slowly past the stripped plum thickets and the white-oaks that were barren then, and kept looking around but not as though he were seeing much. We stood and watched him, dumb-looking as two shoats, I guess, half-braced to run, yet curious to stay. When he got near us and in the gate, we saw that he had two skinny sacks and one had a lump of something inside that kept bumping against his back. He was yellow and liver-spotted and looked as though newly come out of a cellar’s dark.

  “Where’s your Dad gone to, girls?” he said. He had a tired and unpleasant voice.

  I pointed back to the barn, and Merle stared. He had on an overcoat, but it was too short around the knees and tight and had a black velvet piece on the collar, like Dad used to wear a long time past. His nose was red and kept running, and he wiped it off on his sleeve. Father came out and asked what it was he wanted. Spoke to him as though he were already proved a thief and caught.

  “Need any help?” the man wanted to know. “Any picking or digging you aren’t done with yet?—something I could crate up and get what’s left?” He pulled a couple of sweet potatoes out and showed them. They were dry and warped-looking with bad spots on, but pieces that you could eat. “Got these from the last place,” he said. “Ain’t much, are they? But take up room in the stummick—”

  “What’s the idea?” Father asked. “What’re you tramping around here for?”

  “You farmers have got food anyway,” the man said. “I got a family. We have to eat.”

  I was afraid of him and felt sorry for him. He looked mangy and worm-eaten and not used to walking. I wanted to tell him not to talk so defiantly to Father, tell him his way of asking was all wrong. I could see Dad hardening, getting cold and steely. It was the sound the man had of blaming it all on something else—on life or men or maybe God—that was setting Father hard against him. It was blasphemy, Father thought, for this man to thrust blame of his hunger onto something else. I wanted to warn him but I couldn’t. Only stood there staring, with milk slopped down along my shoes.

  “I don’t need any help here,” Father said. “A farmer’s as pinched as any man. We don’t raise stuff for the fun of giving.” He glared at the man—at what used to be a man anyway, but was now only the shard of something crumbled. Glared at him and said, “Go on—get out!” I think it was that he didn’t want to see him there, standing shabby with his jaundiced skin and his nose all slimy, looking like he was sick from his soul clear out and reminding Father of what might have happened to him if there hadn’t been land to save us, and reminding him, too, of what might happen still. The man swore at him and turned back down the lane, crept off like something that wasn’t a person or an animal,—more like a sick and dirty fly.

  “A lying loafer,” Father said. He turned and went back in the barn.

  “We should have given him somet
hing,” Merle said, and I thought of all the dug potatoes and the carrots piled and withering. I was afraid of him, but I couldn’t stand the blob of pity that was smothering in my throat. I couldn’t stand to see him go off that way with the limp sack holding its two potatoes, rotten around the end. “We can cut across the field and get him on the road,” I said. “We can stuff things in my sweater.” Merle was scared. She was afraid he would steal or murder us, I guess. And so was I. We went back and crept down in the cellar and snatched some potatoes up. Merle had carrots and an apple. We climbed the fence and ran out across the field. It was muddy and worse than plugging through deep snow. Merle fell twice and got her face all smeared. She was crying, and lost her breath to call. We saw the man then, passing around where the road-turn was, talking and swearing to himself, and the wind-twitched overcoat pulled tight around what was left of him. “Mister!” I shouted; but he didn’t hear me for its faintness, like the shout of a person in a dream. I was embarrassed and stood there panting, with potatoes still lumped underneath my arms. I couldn’t for fear or shame have called again. And then he turned the corner and was gone off out of sight.

  I had never forgotten his mean and shabby face, and the pity I’d felt for the man himself; and the fear of what he had stood for came back so sharply at times that it might have been only yesterday we watched him go off in the wind. “Lord God!” I said in a sort of prayer, without knowing I spoke aloud.

  Merle turned her red face away from the boiling carrots. “What’s the matter?” she asked, but seemed to know without being told. She shook the pot fiercely over the flame and slammed the lid. “Potatoes were bad that year. We didn’t have much ourselves!” She said it defiantly, but not as any excuse that she believed; she knew it was only a worn old argument used for the sake of peace. Small things stayed deep and hurt her, but she was able easily to forget, and they did not sour her moments of happiness. I wished that I could shift as quickly too from one weather to the next, and not let old fears spread out and stain even the things I loved.