I glanced around. “Where’s Soames?”
“I don’t know,” Jessica said. “Oh, there he is, in the choir!”
“Did Leonie make him go?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Brothers and Sisters—” The preacher stood at the pulpit surveying with solemn pleasure a crowd such as he’d never drawn in a month of Sundays. “Brothers and Sisters, rise with me as we pray.”
The congregation creaked to its feet. From the back row, a child’s voice piped up. “I want to see the man!” She was noisily shushed, and the prayer began.
I counted backwards from a hundred, all the way to zero, and Brother Mosely was still invoking the Lord. Over and over, his earnest voice soared in thunderous tremolo and descended in a minor key. I shifted my weight. My sunburn itched, and one ear hurt where Mama’s hat rubbed against it. I sighed discreetly, longing for the golden weather outside. In all this crowd, who would have missed us? But my mother was right. Though many came here in celebration, few came to mourn. And that was sad, for here lay a man who must have found life good at one time or another, and felt joy and sorrow like all the rest of us. Yet there was no one to miss him, no one at all, except Brother Mosely and my parents. They would miss him a little, not because he had done much for them, but because they had done a little for him.
“…we ask it in Thy name, Amen.”
We gratefully sat down. At a signal from my father, the choir rose again, Leonie played an introduction, and they began to sing.
“Abide with me: fast falls the eventide.”
The old hymn wavered through the church, the ill-assorted voices marshaled into line by my father’s cracked, authoritative bass.
“The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide:
When other helpers fail and comforts flee—”
They had gone about that far when the dog raised his voice. Tied in the car and left behind, he was moved to self-pity by the music and gave expression in a long lugubrious howl. The preacher glanced up in dismay. A titter ran through the church. Beside me, Jessica made a choking noise and poked me with her elbow. On the other side, my mother twitched impatiently, drawing herself up. She knew whose dog it was, and there wasn’t a thing she could do about him without letting everyone else know, too.
The mournful howls continued. Succumbing to competition, the choir began to falter. One by one they choked up, ducked their heads, and stopped singing, till only my father and Soames were left. Dad’s face was livid. He stumbled over the words, lost his place, and started again, and at last, floundering hopelessly, gave up. Soames sang on alone.
At first it was hard to hear him, the church was so sibilant with laughter. But he stood there, young and steadfast and unperturbed, looking like one of those angels of the Lord in ecclesiastic art, tall and fair, masculine and guileless, and his easy voice poured over the crowd like a benediction. Little by little they grew quiet. The dog was shamed to silence. As the last echoes of the hymn died away, the only sound was the twittering of sparrows in the yard. Soames stood for a moment motionless. Then he turned his head and smiled at Leonie, as if there were no other in the church but her.
Suddenly it seemed to me that I looked back from a great distance on that smile and saw it all again—the smile and the day, the whole sunny, sad, funny, wonderful day, and all the days that we had spent here together. What was I going to do when such days came no more? There could not be many; for we were a family growing old. And how would I learn to live without these people? I who needed them so little that I could stay away all year—what should I do without them?
I looked at them—my mother, still a tyrant, with her broom and her fruit jars; my father, softened by age but only as a stone is softened by its moss; Leonie, running counterclockwise to the world; funny old Jessica with Mama’s hat on backwards—and I knew I liked them better than anyone else alive. Then I looked at Mr. Corcoran and began to cry.
The service went on for more than an hour. But at last it was over. The undertaker wheeled the casket into the vestibule, and the old man lay there in state, waiting the long file of the curious, who had come to gaze pop-eyed on the fact of murder.
We were the last ones out. Like relatives we filed out slowly and stood in an indecisive huddle as the undertaker, with a brisk “Okay?” to my father, snapped the lid shut and packed the last of Mr. Corcoran off to eternity.
The worn stones of the church lay in shadow now. It was after five. Around the square and up and down the streets, engines sputtered.
I turned to my father. “Do we have to go to the cemetery?”
He hesitated. Cole Camp was miles away. “I just can’t think of the old soul lowered into his grave without somebody there.”
As he spoke, the hearse crawled forward, followed by the preacher’s Ford. Another car fell into line, followed by another and another. As the hearse turned onto the highway, it was followed by a train reaching half around the square.
“Well,” said my father, “if all of them are going—”
My mother looked at him thoughtfully. “If you think it would be all right, if we hurried, we could still get home in time—”
We heard no more. Our solemnity near the breaking point, we started down the steps. By the time we reached the cars, we were what you might call running. Soames and I took off first. As we turned onto the country road, he rose up in the seat and gave a Comanche yell.
Over the hills we went, hellbent for leather, my father right behind; across the bridge, past Bitterwater, through Barrow’s farm, and down the hill, around the corner, up our lane, into our barnlot—dust flying, hens squawking, all of us shouting, and the first moonflower just beginning to bloom.
“We made it!” my mother cried.
I’ll remember it the rest of my life.
Jessica
1
To his daughters as they grew up, Matthew Soames was God and the weather. He was omnipotent and he was everywhere—at home, at school, at church. There was no place they could go where the dominating spirit was not that of their father. And, like rain or shine, his moods conditioned all they did.
With other people around, he was pleasant as could be, full of laughter and witticisms and conversation marvelous to hear. Ladies often said to them, “Your father is just the nicest man!” The girls could hardly help observing that he turned his sunny side to his public and clouded up at home. There, he was often preoccupied and short-spoken, indifferent to his children except to command or reprove. “Daughter,” he called each of them indiscriminately; it was a little more authoritative than the given name, which might not occur to him at the moment anyway.
“Papa’s nicer to other people than he is to us,” Leonie once said.
“Yes, sometimes he is, honey,” said her mother. “But he’s got to be. Your Papa’s an important man in the community. That’s the way he’s got to act.”
His importance might have been a comfort to the girls if it hadn’t been such a nuisance. There were so many things they were not allowed to do “because it wouldn’t look well.” And they couldn’t get out of his sight and do them, because he was everywhere. For the most part, they resigned themselves to the situation and did as Papa said. The purpose in life, he said, was to work. “Laborare est orare,” he said; and work meant to study your lessons and help Mama.
They had many good times in between. Relatives came often to visit. On the farm they could play in the woods and go fishing. When they moved to town they had girl chums and Sunday School parties. They had no toys to speak of (one doll, handed down from one to the other); but living as they did a good deal out-of-doors, they didn’t need such props. They played with what they had or found or made up and enjoyed themselves hugely. But very early they understood that playing was somewhat suspect, allowed through indulgence, a trivial pastime soon outgrown, and only about twice removed from sin. Pleasure was only once-removed. The girls grew up before they realized that pleasure was not an ugly word. In their father’s v
ocabulary it meant joyrides, dancing, card games, cigarettes, and other things too dreadful to define.
Recreation, however, was honorable. Their father spoke of it with respect. It was an abstraction, smacking of education, and good for you, like boiled turnip tops. The girls weren’t sure just when they were having recreation. But they knew when they had fun. And the most fun was when Papa looked up from his work, every month or so, and saw that they were there. Then, sitting around the heating stove on a winter evening, they might pop corn and listen to stories of his boyhood. (“My-O, did we work when we were kids! Pa used to get us up at four-thirty in the morning to go shuck corn!”) Sometimes they sang together, with Leonie playing the piano. Their father called it recreation, but they enjoyed it just the same.
They cherished these moments like little gifts. Such largess was more than their due. Papa was not obliged to do them this favor. Papa was busy. He had papers to grade and lessons to plan. He had meetings to attend and a thousand and one things to write off for: library books, maps, chalk, and music for the Glee Club. Or he had choir practice at the church, a deacons’ meeting, and his class to teach. He had to milk the cow and spade the garden, put up a heating stove or take it down, clean the henhouse or a sparkplug, and patch a tire on the Model T. On Saturday, like as not, he had to drive to Clarkstown to see the County Superintendent, or down to the farm to see why the tenants hadn’t paid the rent.
His excessive busy-ness took precedence over anything else and often interrupted other plans—such as the time they’d planned to surprise him on his birthday. This was after they had moved to town and learned about birthday parties. They had baked him a cake and Mama let them buy candles. She even let them decorate the dining room. They had spent hours in secret, coloring strips of paper with their Crayolas and pasting them together in interlocking rings. That afternoon they ran home from school and strung them around the room. They got out the best tablecloth, set the table just so, and put the cake in the middle. Everything looked fine. They could hardly wait for Papa to get there. About five o’clock the telephone rang. Papa’s teachers had just sprung a surprise on him at school—a covered-dish supper spread out in the study hall, with a great big cake. He wouldn’t be home for supper.
Mama explained that the girls had also planned a little surprise. But of course Papa couldn’t disappoint his teachers. Jessica and Mathy cried, and Leonie got stomping mad. Mama finally had to bawl her out. “We’ll surprise him tomorrow night,” she said. So they put the cake away and took down the decorations, and the next night they tried again. But it didn’t work. In the middle of supper, Mathy, who was seven years old and too big to cry, burst into tears and smashed her fist right into the birthday cake. Papa lectured her about losing her temper and wanting her own way all the time. She finally shut up, and they all tried to eat the cake anyway, but they couldn’t.
That night Mama came upstairs and gave them a good talking to. She was nice about it, but she made them go and tell Papa good night and tell him they were sorry. It nearly choked them, but they did it. Papa forgave them, as the Heavenly Father does.
In such manner they learned to accept him as one accepts the weather. Though they might complain of him sometimes, there wasn’t much they could do about it, or expected to do. He was threat and authority, the no-sayer, the stern enigma. But their mother had taught them their father like a creed, and their belief in him was profound.
As for Matthew, he loved his children, but in an abstracted way, with perhaps a little less direct concern than for calves or baby chicks. Once they reached school age, he tended to forget they were his. Five days a week they blended into a group of other children whose esteem was more important. Not to seem partial to his own, he treated them with elaborate objectivity.
This was partly in self-defense. For if they could never escape from him, neither could he escape from them. In all his years of teaching, there was hardly a time when he could stand up in a classroom without confronting one or more of his own daughters. The schoolroom clothed him in authority, transformed him nobly each morning. Yet always before him was a little face that had seen him a few hours earlier in his nightshirt, or coming in from the barn in his dirty coat, smelling of milk and manure. Being a public figure and a father too was troublesome.
But this was a minor flaw in his life. Though he often longed for wider horizons, travel, greater knowledge, more time to achieve his goals (he had started late), he was for the most part intensely happy. He loved his work. A schoolhouse was his principality. All he did therein was meat and drink to him and “fire and horse and health and holiday,” as Emerson put it, and he would not have changed places with anyone in the world.
However, “a bell and a plough have each their uses,” and Matthew loved a school only a little more than a farm. He had held on to the place near Renfro—an expensive proposition, as taxes were high and tenants not easy to come by, especially during the war, when nearly everybody deserted to the city. He had no time to work the place himself; when he wasn’t teaching he was attending summer school. Some years a neighboring farmer put in the crops for shares; some years the place lay fallow; and all years it demanded upkeep, like an expensive mistress.
Sometimes he had to be almost secretive about the attentions he paid it. For, though Callie loved the place as he did, she couldn’t help fussing a little. “You ought to buy a new overcoat,” she would tell him. “You look awful shabby to be the superintendent of schools.” Or, “Now, I don’t care—Jessica’s going to graduate in a new dress. If the farm don’t get that new fence this year, it’ll just have to wait!” Somehow, Jessica had her dress and the farm had its fence. But it was touch-and-go all the time, and Matthew worked like a trooper.
2
One spring soon after the war, the house they rented in Shawano was sold from under them. The new owner demanded immediate possession. There were only two other rentals in town—the big Cooper place, which was too highfalutin and just plain too high, and a humbler house which would not be empty till fall. Matthew was seized by a lovely notion. He was weary to death of books and blackboards. Why not, he said to the family, move down to the farm for the summer?
His two oldest daughters had ninety reasons between them why they shouldn’t go. Leonie, an elegant young lady of sixteen, hated to leave her girl chums and her piano teacher. Jessica, who was eighteen and about to graduate, wanted to go to Clarkstown to summer school. Her best friend was going, and they wanted to be roommates and take teacher’s training, learn to play tennis, and go to ice-cream parlors and picture shows. Her father explained that he couldn’t afford to send her; the farm needed new fences and he’d have to buy or rent a team for the summer—that sort of thing. Anyway, her mother said, she had to go along and help. “Mama’s not as strong as she once was.” (Callie was not quite forty and as tough and limber as a hickory sapling. But being limber, she bent easily. When she bowed with the weight of one of her sick spells, they all trembled with fear that she would never straighten. Since the age of thirty she had hinted that death was around the corner.)
Jessica’s real reason for wanting to stay in town was one she could not reveal. She had discovered boys. A late discovery, since Matthew and Callie guarded their daughters like farmers guarding prize pumpkins. The girls never went on dates. Jessica had tried it once, in a tentative way. A boy walked home with her from a party at the schoolhouse. Matthew saw them leave the building, but acknowledging reluctantly the facts of life, he let them go. Unfortunately, he arrived home before they did, by a margin of some ten minutes. He was waiting at the door. He curdled the air with his anger, embarrassed Jessica to death, and scared the boy out of his adolescent wits. Since the word quickly got around, any boy in school who had even looked at “Prof’s” daughters no longer dared to.
But there came a night in spring, during senior play practice, when a boy named Marvin, more reckless than most and possibly on a dare, caught Jessica in the dark by the water cooler and kissed her. She was
terrified—until she made quite sure that her father knew nothing of it. She promptly fell in love. Hopelessly. There wasn’t a thing she could do except look at Marvin. But even that was a comfort. Down in the country she wouldn’t even see him on Sunday!
Her pleas and Leonie’s fell on deaf ears. Papa either scolded or teased them.
“Why, you girls need to hoe some corn!” he said one evening. “You need to get up at four in the morning and milk the cows!” He pulled Jessica down on his knees, though she was too long-legged for lapsitting. “I’ll let you slop the hogs this summer!”
“Oh, Papa!” she said, exasperated. She laughed because he expected her to. She was a tall slim girl with a face as clean and plain and virtuous as a cake of soap. Her hair hung down her back, soft-brown and shiny, held back by a big bow-ribbon. When she did it up, like other girls, Mama and Papa said she looked too old. She didn’t care. She didn’t like to do it up anyway; it made her feel too formal.
Matthew squeezed her face between his thumb and finger. “You’ll have to watch out about that nose this summer. We may have to fix up a little awning to protect it from the sun.”
“Oh now, Papa! It’s not that big.” Jessica hid her face on his shoulder. Her high thin nose gave her a sort of classic beauty, but no one had ever told her so. They only teased her, especially her father, who felt he had a right to tease her, since it was his nose.
He looked down at the little girl sitting on the floor. “Now Mathy’s anxious to go to the farm. Aren’t you, girlie?”
The little girl looked up with bright solemn black eyes. “I love the farm. I can’t wait to get back.”
“What are you doing there?” said Matthew.
“Pressing a four-leaf clover.”
“I don’t think the Bible is any place for that.”
The Moonflower Vine Page 6