Breaking a precedent, Matthew laughed. “Well, boy, it’s the season, I suppose.” For once in his life he was in sympathy.
In the mornings he could not wait to be off to school. He approached the building in a happy torment, wondering if all this were his imagination. But soon, there she stood, in a crowd of students, turning her blue eyes on him in a soulful glance or flashing him a quick secret smile, and his day was assured. He had never found her again on the path through the pasture, though he went that way hopefully each night. But in the afternoons they met in the office during study hall to rehearse the dramatic reading. They did not commit themselves to each other in so many words, but no words were needed—looks, laughter, the playful touch of hands, once even a hasty kiss, said all that was necessary. Not for a long time had Matthew coped with such sensations, the sudden joyful lurch of the heart, the dry throat, the palsied hands. She was indeed beautiful. The prettiest girl in school, sought after by all the boys. Yet she loved him. She turned pink in his presence, pouted adorably, and sighed. How dear and piteous he thought her. He should in all fairness discourage her affection; that would be kindest. But for a little while, it would do no harm. She would outgrow it soon enough. And so would he. While it lasted he might as well enjoy the daylights out of it.
He began to look forward eagerly to the county contests, held annually in Clarkstown. Alice would be there with her dramatic reading. He too would be there. Unfortunately, twenty more of his students would also be there, and he would spend the day riding herd. (No one was ever at the right place at the right time. Sopranos lost altos; the relay team lost each other. The spellers waited patiently on one floor while the match began on the next. Delmora Jewel threw up from excitement. And the girls’ trio invariably were watching the boys on the track field when it came their turn to sing.) But maybe in all the confusion he and Alice could slip off from the others for a little while and be alone. In the library, perhaps; that should be safe enough! Or on some remote part of the campus, where they could stroll together, boy and girl, as he had seen others do. (Having gone to college by bits and pieces and already married, he had never had time for the classical light campus loves, and had sometimes envied the younger men idling on the summer lawns with the pretty girls.)
He began happily to plot their escape.
On the Monday before the contests, he arrived at school before the janitor. He unlocked and went up to his office. He had barely hung up his hat when he heard the front door slam. He glanced up eagerly, hoping to see Alice’s red-golden head rise into view. Instead, up came the brown little braided head of Delmora Jewel. Almost anyone else would have been less of a disappointment. Poor Delmora couldn’t help being her mother’s daughter, but neither could Matthew help holding it against her.
“Hi, Mr. Soames!” she called.
“Good morning, Delmora.”
She started up to the third floor, hesitated, and came back down. With her toes turned out, looking like a small elderly eccentric, she tripped down the hall toward the office.
“Mr. Soames, did you hear the news?”
“What news, Delmora?”
“Didn’tcha hear?” Her eyes glittered behind the gold-rimmed glasses. “Alice Wandling ran off with Ed Inwood!” She stared up at him with her mouth wide open in a horrible ecstatic grin. “They run off to Springfield and got married!”
“When—” said Matthew without any voice. He tried again. “When did all this happen?”
“Last night, I s’pose.”
“Don’t you know for sure?”
“Well, all I heard was they run off.”
“Are you sure you aren’t repeating idle gossip, Delmora?”
“Oh, no sir! It’s the truth. It was on the line this morning. My mother heard it.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. Lots of ugly stories get started that turn out to be false.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s ugly! They were crazy about each other. Everybody knew that.”
Matthew cleared his throat. “Were they?”
“Sure. Alice’s folks couldn’t stand Ed, though. They wouldn’t let him in the house. She used to sneak out and meet him all the time. She was terrible!”
“All right, Delmora. I don’t think it’s necessary to discuss it.”
“I thought you might like to know.”
“The less said about it, the better.”
“Yes sir. And I heard that—”
The front door slammed again and a crowd of girls ran up the stairs. With a squeak of delight, Delmora darted away.
From the end of the hall the babble of voices pelted against him like handfuls of pebbles. He went over and shut the door.
7
Alice and Ed ran away in the night and drove all the way to the Ozarks in Ed’s secondhand Overland. They were married the next morning by a Holy Roller preacher who had a wife a little younger than Alice and didn’t bother to ask their ages. They had left a trail, however. Alice’s parents caught up with them by noon; caught them in a hotel room in Springfield, so the story ran, with Alice sitting on the bed, mother-naked, eating a ham sandwich. They fetched her home and set about to have the marriage annulled. The following Monday, chastened and humiliated, Alice was back in school.
Ed came back, too, just long enough to pick up his sweater and quit. Matthew didn’t even have the satisfaction of expelling him.
Meanwhile, there was the matter of the elocution contest. When Leonie found out that Alice had abdicated, she rushed directly to Matthew and begged to take Alice’s place. Since there was no time to prepare someone else, Matthew consented. Leonie went to work with a zeal that would have moved a house and declaimed all over the place. Each afternoon she insisted on declaiming for Matthew. He listened doggedly, ruefully remembering the afternoons with Alice. The contrast between those and these was almost more than he could endure.
On Saturday morning at the college, Leonie represented Shawano High School. She delivered her reading in a clear confident voice and did not win so much as honorable mention.
That evening, as they met at the car to go home, Matthew said, “I’m sorry, Daughter. But that’s just the way things go. Not everyone can win.”
“I could have,” Leonie said firmly, “if I’d had as much practice as Alice Wandling had.”
Matthew held his tongue. She was mistaken, but he had no right to say so. Leonie climbed into the back seat with Mathy and said no more. All the way home she kept quietly blowing her nose. By the time they got there, Matthew was so filled with sympathy that he was speechless with rage.
Alice paid him no more visits to the office. She sat in class with swollen, downcast eyes. When they passed in the hall they did not speak. Yet the faint scent of roses as she went by tormented him with reminders of what he had lost. The image of himself as poet and lover, brilliant and chosen, crumbled around him, revealing the same old armature at the core, the plain, humdrum, everyday man. He went about his business sullen with chagrin. And still the maddening, beautiful spring weather continued.
Graduation time approached. Matthew plodded through the annual festivities with no pleasure. That too had been taken from him.
“It is my punishment,” he said aloud, sitting at his desk one night in the empty schoolhouse. He had come back, as usual, after supper, to grade papers. “This is what I get for it. Oh, I know it, Lord. I broke the Commandment. I committed adultery in my heart, as it says in the Bible. If she was false, that doesn’t excuse me.”
He thought about it for a moment and added, “And I’ve been a damned fool, besides.”
He was not a swearing man, but the word was too felicitous to be profane. Indeed, it was the foolishness more than the sin that rankled. One can repent of a sin and have done with it; but the wages of foolishness is the eternal recalling of it.
He opened the window and leaned out. The night air washed softly against his face. In the west, over the graveyard hill, the sky glowed deep-blue. Thus he had stood,
that golden afternoon when she first came to him. She with her soft pink mouth and her dissembling glances. Because I’m crazy about you! That’s what she had said. Oh, it was a clever stratagem, when he had caught her running home from a lovers’ tryst. He thought of Ed, that arrogant, insolent boy. He thought of the two of them together, meeting in dark places in secret, holding each other, kissing; the frantic hands, the hot whispers. Oh, the things she must have said to him, the things she must have let him do. Matthew groaned.
“And all the time you thought it was you she wanted!” He lifted his head and laughed wearily. “Old fool,” he said. “Old, homely, sinful old fool.”
He slammed the window down like a guillotine, turned out the light, and left the building. A full moon hung halfway up the sky. Crossing the schoolyard, he stepped over the fence into Seabert’s pasture and walked on, with his hands in his pockets, into the grove of trees, and through them up the long slope of the hill, till he came out on top among the tombstones. They stood white and peaceful in the moonlight.
“Good evening,” he said aloud, as to old friends, and moving among the familiar furniture of the dead, he began to feel calmer. Up here the things that troubled him seemed to matter less. When he was dead they would matter not at all. He sat down behind a headstone, facing the moon. Looking out into space, where man had found other suns and planets but had not yet plotted heaven, he began once more to contemplate the puzzle of himself.
8
On another night, many years before, Matthew had sat alone in another graveyard. Young and troubled, he had stopped in Millroad Churchyard in the late October dusk. The sun had gone down, bleeding red along the horizon. He watched the light empty out of the sky and darkness blot up Missouri, all he could see from that high slope: Carpenter’s fields, Clarence Oechen’s timber, and the rocky pastures of his own father’s farm. In the deepening dusk the land withdrew beyond possessing. Matthew flattened his back against the headstone and, looking out across the unclaimed landscape, he tried to feel the turning of the earth. He began to think round, holding the awareness of the moment in his head, as one would hold a pumpkin in the hands, and tried to memorize its shape and smell and color. His senses expanded to take the whole thing in: this moment in October toward the end of the century, on this hill in America upon a spinning globe, which at this very moment bore him on a journey around the sun. He moved ahead in time and looked back on the moment, to evaluate the significance of now. Around and around he went and to and fro, trying to realize time and the world and his own place in it.
Under his feet lay the bones of his ancestors. In other lands, in older graves, other forebears lay. He wondered what sort of men they were. Whose blood had come down through the conduit of his ancestry? Musing in the clear cold air, Matthew said to himself, “Who am I?” and wondered for the thousandth time how he happened to be born himself and not his brother Aaron or some girl or any one of those who lay under the ground around him. He might have been born an Indian before the time of Columbus, or one of the Children of Israel. Yet here he was in America in 1896, sitting behind his grandfather’s grave with the night-damp seeping through his woolen britches and his nose in need of blowing. And how was he to know if this came about by plan or by some helter-skelter flinging of lives into time and place?
However it came about, he was not happy with it. He did not wish to be himself, eighteen and timid, nor to be here alone in the dusk instead of attending the penmanship class, down the road at the schoolhouse.
For the last three weeks, Mr. Kolb from Sedalia had conducted a class in the Palmer Method. Five nights a week the neighbors had gathered at Thorn School, each with a coal-oil lamp, ink and pens and foolscap, to improve their handwriting. Crowded into the small seats, they filled page after page with careful strokes: upper loops, lower loops, right curves and left. Tonight, since this was the last meeting, there would be a contest and, for the one who wrote the finest hand, the prize of a silver dollar.
Matthew wanted that prize. He lusted for it so steadily that it seemed the symbol of his future. It was not the dollar that counted (though he dreamed of buying a derby hat, or cufflinks that rattled); what really counted was the courage which winning would give him. If he won, he had made up his mind to go away to school. He was going to Sedalia with Mr. Kolb, if Mr. Kolb would have him, and find some kind of work. He would go to high school and earn a certificate so that he could teach.
The decision frightened him. For he had not been out of the township more than a few times, and then only as far as the nearest county seat. He had no money and not an idea in the world how to behave in any other environment except the one he was born to. The rest of the world baffled him. Though he read all he could about it, this was little enough. The books at Thorn School, where he had gone for a dozen years, were the same books year after year. And though he borrowed books wherever he could, few of the neighbors owned more than a Bible. One of them, however, lent him a book about the earth. He read with an excitement almost painful about glaciers and inland seas and centuries of rainfall. He thought of it constantly. This information was not quite compatible with Genesis, and he took to reading the Bible in a spirit of quest, with a sharp eye for clues. But all he learned only plagued him for more.
From these books, and from peddlers, circuit riders, and itinerant teachers, he had pieced together some notion of another way of life. He knew there was something more than what he found in his father’s house (a house of homemade brick, crowded with older brothers and younger sisters; a Christian house with Grace but no graces, loyalty with little affection, and little time for anything except hard work). Since Matthew was the only one who had this unsettling suspicion, it followed that the others should be suspicious of him. They could seldom find much to hold against him, in all honesty. But he wanted something more than they wanted, and that was enough to arouse them. He made them uneasy, like an omen of bad luck. And so they destroyed him each day with their counterspells of cheerful derision. He was made to feel guilty for aspiring to more than Divine Will had seen fit to give him. In a thousand little covert, even unintentional ways, they implied that he was a freak and an ingrate, and he believed them.
He knew, because he could look around and see, that he could do things as well as his brothers and do more kinds of things. He could plow more ground in a day, hitch a team faster, break broomcorn as well as a much heavier man. He could also read, write, spell, and do fractions. And he knew something of music. There was never a teacher who came through, recruiting pupils for a singing school, who didn’t get Matthew’s dollar. And he earned the dollar himself.
Yet none of these things gave him confidence. All they gave him was egotism, which is less the conviction of one’s worth than the desire for that conviction. He was ill at ease among others, afraid of them and resentful of his fear. And he did not like the way he looked. He had grown up too suddenly to be accustomed to himself. One day there he stood, a pale-haired young man nearly six feet tall, with a high thin slice of a nose and big bones bulging under his skin like potatoes in a sack. All his joints were too large—his knees and elbows and knuckles. His brown eyes were intelligent and his face had a restless compelling look that redeemed his features, knitted them together in some harmony, and gave them a kind of comeliness. But Matthew had no way of knowing. His older brothers were ruddy and big-chested like their father, and he was different, and that was blemish enough. Even when the rest of his body began to fit with his knees and elbows, he took no comfort from his appearance.
Moreover, he had been taught humility. In the rigid mold of his upbringing, self-respect was tantamount to vanity. “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” This teaching, however, could not put down a certain pride that he was born with. And so, having humility imposed upon that pride, he turned out not so humble as humiliated.
He kept a good deal to himself, taking refuge in the things of nature, which he loved for their own
sake as well as for the protection they gave him. He knew all the woods and creeks around the countryside. He knew where to find the first wild grapes, the biggest hazelnuts and the greediest fish, and what day of spring the button willows showed their first green. He could stand for a long time so still that the wood doves gathered in the branches around him, while their soft plump syllables fell through the leaves like ripe fruit.
And yet, protection was not all he wanted. His nature cried out not to be lonely but to sing and laugh and kiss the pretty girls. He had a right to such enjoyments. Reason told him so. But he did not dare to presume, unless he could hold up to others some proof of his worthiness, some tangible evidence—say, a silver dollar. And that is why he had to win the penmanship contest. If he wanted to go away to school, he had to prove he deserved to go.
Everyone said he would win tonight. But they had said it last year, too, when someone else taught the class. When the night of the contest came, his heart had beat like a chopping ax, his hand shook, and the letters wavered. When he copied the proverb from the blackboard, he left out a word. And wanting so much to win, he had lost to Ben Carpenter, who didn’t care much, one way or another. This year, Matthew told himself, things would be different. But the time had come, and his small store of confidence was all used up before the sun went down, like a small boy’s bread when he runs away from home.
Everything had gone wrong all day. When his father called them, before daylight, Matthew had gone back to sleep and the others had eaten up all the breakfast. His father said it was justice. He had to get along with a handful of persimmons. Then the mules took it into their heads not to go to the cornfield; he had to fight them all morning. The harness broke twice. At noon he was cross and hungry and lost what was left of his temper when he found that his sister Bertie had hidden his pen and ink. She produced them, after their mother had spoken sharply. But before Matthew could get his hands on them, Aaron snatched them up.
The Moonflower Vine Page 16