“I don’t know nothin’ about clerking.”
“Well, you could learn. You’re smarter’n any clerk I ever saw. I declare, Matthew, you’re so timid about things! Why couldn’t we take the chickens with us and sell eggs to the town folks?”
“Eggs don’t bring anything these days.”
“They sure ain’t down to five cents a dozen like they was three or four years ago. And I hear they’re goin’ up every day.”
She kept at him, sweet and persistent, until his self-pity gave way to hope. But it was hope shot through with misgivings. Maybe he was too old, he said; maybe he wasn’t smart enough to catch up. She had a time with him. He always resisted the thing he wanted most. But she had married him, and she could get him off to school.
They were all set to move to Clarkstown for the winter when, at the last minute, Matthew refused to let go of the farm. These fields and woods were his by virtue of love, and he could no more let them fall into careless hands than he could loan out his wife. Seeing that what he wanted was everything—the farm, education, and her—Callie sensibly decided that two-thirds of what you want is plenty and she was the expendable third.
“I’ll stay here,” she said, “and keep the place. Thad and Wesley can come and stay with me part of the time, and I reckon we can make out.” Thad and Wesley were her younger half-brothers.
So Matthew went off to school alone, riding away one gray October morning on old Pharaoh. A change of clothing hung in a sack slung over the saddle. Behind him, on Pharaoh’s rump, lay a bag of provender—onions, potatoes, a side of bacon, and two loaves of bread still warm from the oven. Callie watched him up the hill till the cold mist closed behind him, thinking her heart would break. He would be gone for six months. She would miss him every minute, and worse yet, he would miss her. How would he sleep in the long winter nights without her to warm him, and what would he do among strangers when the black moods came on him and he lost faith in himself? He was going to be so lonely for her! Yet he knew this, and still he went. She cried a little more, out of vexation.
Matthew did miss her that winter. He was lonely and homesick. He found it hard to catch on to new ways, and it seemed to him that no one in this town did anything the way they did back home. This was largely true. For though he had come north some forty miles as the mule traveled, Little Tebo was half a century away in time. He took refuge in his studies, where he felt safer. Though new means and manners came hard to him, book learning came easy. He accomplished a full term’s work and left for home before the term was out. It was April, and he had to put the spring crops in.
All summer long, Matthew studied at home. He read Emerson and Hawthorne as he rode the plow. He sat at noon on the creek banks, coping with algebra. In the evenings he studied history at the kitchen table, while June bugs landed like fat pebbles around the lamp and Callie swatted moths, pausing now and then to fan him and heave a deep sigh of boredom.
Late in August he took an examination at the county seat and received a certificate. Bitterwater School hired him for the winter at twenty-five dollars a month. He was a teacher at last, and once again he was so happy that he felt guilty.
Callie’s happiness was unblemished. She was the wife now of the neighborhood’s most accomplished member. Her husband had fulfilled her faith. And brilliant and beloved, he had given her a child. Sometimes when she felt it move inside her, there seemed no way to contain her joy. She would sit down and look about her, blessing the walls, the furniture, the very churn and broom and buttermold, the quilts and dishes of her house. Other times she walked outside and stood quite still, looking at her healthy garden, at the big trees and the sky and in the distance the high pastures catching the sunlight, and said to herself in some manner, “Praise Him!” meaning both God and her husband.
11
Their first child was born in March. They named her Jessica, because Callie thought it had a fine aristocratic sound. She had a great aversion to names that sounded common. Matthew hadn’t cared much whether he sired a girl or a boy, but he was disappointed, since it was a girl, that she didn’t resemble Callie. This was his child; there was no mistaking that, from the first. However, she was a good, winsome baby and ever so grateful for having been born. Not every baby is, as they were to find out two years later when the second one came along.
Leonie was cranky. She threw up Callie’s milk, broke out in rashes, and screamed half the night. At rare moments they could see that she was an exquisite-looking child. And after a while she seemed to accept the fact that she must put up with living, whether she liked it or not. She settled down and became a very tolerable member of the family.
In the next years, Matthew and Callie got ahead little by little. They were able to buy the farm and some ground adjoining and add more rooms to the house. They worked diligently in order to do it and lived frugally. There were many hardships—drought and flood and other plagues of nature. And there was sorrow. Matthew’s mother and father died and the family scattered. For a while his youngest brother came to live with them. Later his brother Aaron, who had never married, came also, ill now with consumption, that huge ruddy man. Shielding the children from him, they nursed him through one winter until, as a last desperate measure, he betook himself to Colorado, where he too died. Matthew, tall, gangling, and pale, was the toughest of them all and he endured while the others sickened, one after the other. He buried them in Millroad Churchyard, one per winter, till only a brother, his sister Bertie and himself were left.
Callie’s father, widowed again, came to stay with them a month or two at a time—in and out, disconsolate, restless, his high spirits dipping to a sort of plaintive humor. He was sick from one thing and another and at last was taken ill in a boarding house in Sedalia. Matthew went on the train and brought him home to die.
They were not easy years. But death and uncertain weather were the way of life. Matthew went on steadily, working his farm, teaching his school, studying and learning.
After a number of years at Bitterwater, his academic efforts were rewarded with a new position. Renfro, the nearest town, decided that the community should have a high school. Accordingly, they built a new room onto the grade school building and hired a professor. Two weeks before school began the professor suddenly died.
In complete innocence Matthew said, “I wonder what they’ll do about it. Where will they find another teacher this late?”
“I know where,” said Callie. “Matthew, you can teach that school. Why don’t you go over there and see about it?”
“Mercy goodness, Callie, I’m not qualified!”
“I’ll bet you’re as qualified as he was or better.”
“Well, now, I’m not so sure of that.”
“I am. Why don’t you go see about it, Papa? It wouldn’t hurt nothin’ just to go see.”
“Aw, I kinda hate to do that. Mr. Motherwell was just buried yesterday. I’d feel like a buzzard—couldn’t hardly wait for the body to get cold.”
“Somebody’s going to do it. And they can’t wait all year. School’s startin’.”
“Yes, and so is my school. If I went over to Renfro, who would teach my school?”
“The one that’s otherwise going to teach in Renfro and make more money. That’s who.”
“There are some considerations more important than money,” Matthew said loftily and went off to the barn.
That was the last that was said about it until two days later, when the school board in Renfro came looking for him.
They hired him over his own protests, at what seemed to him a mighty fancy salary. He would not accept until he had gone to the county seat and found another teacher to take his place at Bitterwater. This moral obligation discharged, he embarked with tremorous zeal on his new assignment. Within a month the tremors ceased, the zeal increased, and he was as happy as he could be.
Or nearly so.
There was something that troubled him a little at home. It was not that Callie had become a mother only,
forgetting to be a wife. Not that at all. In spite of her busy-ness and the frequent presence of relatives, she found time to be alone with him. Made time, in fact, as on rainy days, when she made the children play indoors. Then she would run to the barn or the smokehouse, wherever he was working, and bring her pan of beans to string or potatoes to peel and sit on a box nearby so they could visit. And at night after the children were put to bed, she was his girl again, soft and solicitous, her small body obedient to his.
But somehow, in spite of this, a gap had opened between them. Nothing wide, but wide enough that he felt it. He knew that in part he was to blame. He had so many kinds of things on his mind. What with farming, teaching, and studying, he was simply too busy to devote much time to her.
And yet, in a way, he had tried. Loving the facts, theories, ideas which he found in books, he had tried to share them with her. He had tried, early in their marriage, to teach her to read. Although she had a good mind, and though she had gone through the Fourth Reader at school, he was shocked to find that she had trouble even with simple words and could read little more than a primer. Naturally what she was able to puzzle out bored her. He set about to teach her longer words and how to write and spell them. Sometimes he gave her exercises to do, as he would a child at school. Dutifully Callie recited her lesson and drew the words on paper with a stiff hand, until at last she began to yawn and stretch and complain of her eyes.
“I reckon I’ve learned enough for today,” she would say. “Didn’t I do pretty good?”
“Not good—well.”
“Oh pshaw! Good or well, what’s the difference! They amount to the same thing. Let’s go over across the branch and pick them wild grapes. I’ll make you some jelly.”
Smiling a little ruefully, he would go with her. She was so sweet, so gay, so pretty and beguiling that he hadn’t the heart to be cross.
Sometimes he told her stories. He recounted the wanderings of Ulysses, the romance of Lancelot and Elaine; he told her of Sydney Carton and David Copperfield, Indian wars and Benjamin Franklin. Callie listened until some convenient pause, when she would break in with a comment on the weather or the woodpile or the quality of this year’s potatoes.
It was the same when he talked of his schoolwork. He found it no use to come home at night and try to communicate the day’s satisfactions. If things had gone badly, why, then she was all sympathy and attention. Otherwise his work did not interest her. And apparently she figured that if he had time to stand around talking of school and such, he had time to help her. He usually ended by churning the butter (“as long as you’re standin’ there”) or helping her stretch lace curtains; or she would entice him off for a walk in the woods to hunt the guinea’s nest. He had no objection to most of this. But he did think wistfully how fine it would be if they could talk of books together.
He observed, however, that though she cared little for his scholastic duties, she was downright vain of them to others. He heard her sometimes bragging to the neighbors. “He has to study tonight!” she would say, as if it were just too tiresome of him (and it was!). But she was bragging. No one else’s husband had such a distinguished fault.
“Come and study with me,” he said sometimes. “We’ll learn some history.”
“Oh, you go ahead. I’ll just sit here and read the Bible.”
After a while he stopped trying to teach her.
The components of his life, at first a successful amalgam, began little by little to separate, so that now he led two lives. And the more the public life involved him, the more he came to love it. It was as a facet of this life that he loved Charlotte Newhouse.
12
One morning in February of his second winter in Renfro, a tall girl in a hat and a furred cape walked into his schoolroom and introduced herself. She was new in the community, had come from St. Louis to stay with an aunt and uncle, and she wished to enroll in school. Her voice was high and elegant, a cultivated voice. Tetanized by her cool good manners, Matthew could scarcely pronounce his own name and shake the hand she offered. He assigned her to a desk and showed her where to hang her wraps.
“Thank you,” she said, with a slight inclination of the head. “You are most kind.”
The phrase tickled him, it sounded so formal and charming. Most kind, he said to himself, wanting to laugh; most kind! He was most kind to her all day long.
The children were most unkind. They snickered and stared, made fun of her clothes, her hair, and her name. They called her Miss Oldhouse and Skinny and Paleface. She bore it with dignity and a trace of amusement.
When school was dismissed in the afternoon, she asked if she might wait in the building until her uncle came. She sat in the back, leafing through a book, while Matthew sat up front at his desk and did his schoolwork. Neither of them spoke. The pressure of silence grew. He was conscious of his breathing; his stomach made hunger noises and he needed to urinate. After almost three-quarters of an hour, the uncle mercifully arrived.
“Good night, Mr. Soames,” said Charlotte. “It has been most enjoyable.”
The aunt and uncle, who lived some miles on the other side of Renfro, were a childless couple known to be well off and considered uppity. Matthew knew them only by sight. Each morning the uncle drove Charlotte into town in the buggy and each evening drove back to collect her. He was invariably late. During the waits, which varied from twenty minutes to an hour, Matthew and the girl began to get acquainted.
He learned that her mother and father were divorced, that her mother had recently remarried and rushed off to Europe on a honeymoon. Since the marriage had taken place impetuously, there had been no time to make elaborate arrangements for Charlotte. The simplest thing was to send her down to the country for three months with her mother’s sister. (Moreover, Mother thought it would be good for her to breathe country air for a while and contemplate nature.) Charlotte had not wanted to come, but there was nothing else to do.
She spoke of the divorce quite openly. Matthew was shocked by her casual reference to it. But the girl seemed modest and ladylike, not at all coarsened by the experience. On the contrary she was most refined. He found out that she had studied painting, that she attended the opera and saw plays on the stage. Her mother’s friend (“who is now my stepfather”) sometimes took them to concerts.
She admitted serenely that she cared little for schoolwork. As a matter of fact, she had not intended to come to school at all, these three months, but to devote them to reading, which she adored, and contemplating nature, as Mother had enjoined. But after a week of books, nature, and nothing else, she had found herself hopelessly bored and had decided to come to school.
She read the novels of Scott and Dickens and spoke of other writers and books unfamiliar to Matthew—Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, George Sand (Matthew was amazed to learn that George Sand was a woman), and a novel called Madame Bovary, written by a Frenchman. How had she come in contact with these writings, he wanted to know. Were they taught in school in St. Louis? Charlotte explained that she had read most of them at home; her mother owned lots of books. Mother herself had written part of a novel, which she had let Charlotte read.
Poetry, too, was dear to her heart, particularly that of Keats and Tennyson (how she loved “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Lady of Shalott”!) and a book which mother had received for Christmas, The Rubáiy´t of Omar Khayy´m.
“The what of who?”
“The Roo-bye-ott of Omar Ky-am. It’s very beautiful. When I get back home I’ll send you a copy.”
Such talk dazzled Matthew. She spoke so properly, in her high fainting voice, saying the most surprising things, manipulating uncommon vocabulary as easily as the days of the week. Each day he looked forward eagerly to these late-afternoon chats. Charlotte, too, seemed to welcome them. As the door closed behind the other pupils, they turned to each other, laughing with relief, and shook hands in a playful ritual of greeting, as if they had not really met that day until this moment. Charlotte perched herself on a d
esk near the front, while Matthew, barricaded behind his own desk, tilted his chair against the blackboard, and they talked of books and travel and music and each other.
Charlotte often exclaimed how lovely it would be if he could visit her in St. Louis. She could show him the big buildings, the museum and the universities, and they could go to a concert together. She did miss the concerts! How nice if Matthew could go to school in St. Louis this summer! She spoke of this so often that Matthew began to consider the possibility. It had never occurred to him to go anywhere except to the normal school in Clarkstown. But why not St. Louis? The trip itself would be an education.
It became a little game with them: When Matthew came to St. Louis, they would go one evening to the show boat and see a minstrel show. First they would have dinner at a grand restaurant. They would drink champagne!
“Is champagne intoxicating?” said Matthew.
“What do you mean?” said Charlotte, looking puzzled.
“Does it make you drunk?”
“Certainly not!” She looked at him incredulously. “Champagne isn’t beer!”
Well, and what else would they do?
Well, they would ride out to the Parade Grounds at Jefferson Barracks and watch the soldiers drill, all dressed up in their uniforms; that was very thrilling. They would go to the new Coliseum; they would go canoeing. They would visit Shaw’s Garden and the buildings left from the Fair (what a pity he couldn’t have been in St. Louis then!). She would wear her hat with the roses on it and carry her pink parasol. He would wear a straw hat and twirl a cane and look so grand that everyone would think he came from New York City! They would stroll among the flowers, and people would take him for her beau! (Shouts of laughter.)
And what else?
Oh, there would be lots of splendid things to do. The city would open its arms to him.
And so on and on, until Matthew’s head was turned so many times it spun like a globe map.
The Moonflower Vine Page 19