Callie, of course, was pregnant. This surprised neither of them. Though she was happy about it, he was gnawed with guilt. He could not help feeling this child was begot in adultery. For he had used his wife—that was the only honest word—while wanting another woman.
And yet, he had also wanted Callie that night, because she made him want her. And she had done so since. He was a little resentful of the way she contented him. Because of her, the wellbred Charlotte was fading, and with her, the concerts and museums, the fine speech and the cultivated manners.
Well, let them go. They were too far beyond his reach anyway. How could he, with his humble beginning, presume to such attainments? And what if he didn’t have the concert hall, art galleries, the company of scholars? He had the birds; they made music that lifted the soul. He had the sky, whereon God painted. For company he had all of Nature. The books weren’t written that could teach men more than she could! He looked at his acres with a light heart.
But oh!—as he picked up the reins again—oh, the books that were written and the people who could read them! Oh, the things that were happening in the world, and all the seas, the mountains, craters, castles, forts and ships and statues, jungles, pageantry, and all the graceful fair-skinned girls that he would never know!
15
The child was born in January in the midst of an ice storm, when the world outside snapped and splintered and tree boughs crashed on the roof.
It was so bad that morning that Matthew almost stayed home from school. Callie didn’t expect the baby for a few more days, but she didn’t see why Matthew had to go out in all that weather.
“Ain’t any of the children gonna be there,” she said, “not on a day like this.”
“Well,” said Matthew, “I’ve got the key, and I wouldn’t want any of them to get locked out.”
“Can’t they get the preacher to unlock—if they’re silly enough to be out in all this? Ain’t he got a key?”
“Yes, but I hate not to be there.”
“It wouldn’t do no harm to miss once.”
“I know. But the stores and the bank will be open. It wouldn’t look well if the school were closed.”
“Well, my land! All them men live in town.”
“Maybe they think I should live in town, too, so I could give better service.”
“You’re over there all the time, the way it is.”
“Well, Callie, that’s my job!”
“All right, go on then!” she said. “If you’re so anxious to please everybody, go ahead and go. You and your horse can freeze solid—they ain’t gonna think any more of you. But anyway, leave Jessica at home.”
Jessica, who was by this time nearly seven, had started to school in the fall. She rode in the saddle with Matthew each morning and he dropped her off at Bitterwater on his way to town. But this morning he rode off without her, sulking because Callie had no understanding of his obligations.
Two or three of the town children appeared—enough to make him feel righteous but hardly enough to justify building a fire. He sent them home at noon and soon after started on his precarious journey to the farm. The mare slipped on the icy roads and they had to dodge fallen branches. It was dark by the time they reached home.
The house, too, was dark. Matthew put the mare in the stall and hurried inside. No fire burned in the range; no lamps were lighted.
“Callie?” he called.
“We’re all right.” Her voice came from the front room. “We’re in here.”
She lay in the bed in the dark, with the new baby beside her. The little girls sat close together by the heating stove.
“It’s all right, honey,” she said. “You’ve got a new daughter!”
Matthew dropped to his knees beside her without speaking. The little girls came over and he held them in his arms.
“Don’t cry,” Callie said. “It wasn’t so bad. Jessica helped real good. She brought me things and put wood in the stove and kept us warm.” She reached out and touched Jessica’s head. “I don’t know what Mama would have done without her.”
Matthew kissed her and kissed the children and still could not speak. Laughing and crying, he knelt there, stroking Callie’s forehead.
She laughed. “Now go on, Papa, and light the lamp. Don’t you want to see your new baby?”
She was a tiny thing with lots of dark hair.
“Hello!” said Matthew gently, bending over her with the lamp. “Good evening, little girl!”
Callie’s dark eyes shone up at him. “Her name is Matthew,” she said.
“But she’s a girl—she looks like you!”
“I want her named for her father.” She kissed the new little head. “We’ll call her Mathy.”
16
Now, years later, sitting in the moonlit graveyard above Shawano, Matthew thought of Callie waiting down there, lying awake perhaps in the dark house, listening for his footstep…waiting, always waiting, with the warm supper, the warm bed. Waiting for him to come home, knowing that he did not always bring his heart home with him. She must have known. Not every time and not everything, but enough to hurt. Without any facts or names, she knew about Charlotte. And so she followed him to the woods that midnight. And so Mathy was born. Mathy was Charlotte’s child. But Callie had borne her, saving Charlotte—and him—the trouble.
She had saved him more than once by her loyalty and long-sufferance. He was grateful to her—and a little resentful, too. Sometimes a man didn’t want to be saved. But then, he did, really. No matter what he did to her, he couldn’t live without her, and he wouldn’t want to.
“I love her,” he said, wishing sorrowfully that he loved her only. He hadn’t quite. And probably he wouldn’t. For the girls kept coming on, year after year, a new crop every fall, ripening girls lined up before him for his delectation. And he would in sorrow, he supposed, eat of the apple all the days of his life.
Mathy
1
By her first act—arriving early as she did, that day when he was gone—Matthew’s youngest daughter put him in an unfavorable light. (Sometimes he thought her mother had her early on purpose, just to spite him. Whether it was her fault or her mother’s or no one’s, it irked him.) He might have forgiven her this, however, if she had behaved differently thereafter. She was a likable child, part of the time; bright and funny, often appealing. But she had a positive talent for getting him into trouble—a talent which flowered luxuriantly about the time they left the farm.
This was a little before the first war, when Matthew first accepted the position in Shawano. He wasn’t at all sure it was the right thing to do. The greater prestige and responsibility, while attractive, frightened him. Callie too had her doubts. Though for years she had dreamed of living in town, she began to look at her blunt hands and listen to her speech, and her cool practical courage faltered. Even so, she knew as well as he did that they had to go.
In spite of the natural shyness of farm children, the two older girls looked forward eagerly to the move. People, stores, excitement! They thought of life in town as one perpetual Saturday afternoon.
It was the youngest who resisted all the blandishments of change. Mathy was five and a half that summer and as busy as she could be. She didn’t have time to pack up and move. Seeing the preparations go on in spite of her, she hid all her clothes. She buried the doll in the orchard. She climbed the tallest tree on the place and refused to come down. She ran off to the neighbors’ and pleaded to live with them. Finally, on the morning of departure, she vanished entirely. Why in creation, said Matthew, hadn’t someone tied her to the fence! White-lipped, he struck off through the pasture toward the willow slew, where he had often found her knee-deep in the marsh grass. Callie looked through the house and the girls searched the grounds. Jessica found her at last in the garden, under a polebean vine where the three crossed sticks made a little tepee. There she sat, all charcoal eyes and ferocity, ready to scratch and bite.
Nobody had the heart to spank her—least
of all Matthew, who, no farther from home than the barnlot, was so homesick he could have died. Grim and silent, he drove away in the big wagon, his best cow tied to the back, his family huddled behind him among the furniture and chicken coops, and that child screaming her head off.
To his relief, Mathy bowed to necessity soon after they were settled. Before long, neighbors and other novelties seemed to take her mind off the farm. The older girls were blissfully happy. They hadn’t been in town two weeks till they had been invited to three birthday parties, something new to them. And every afternoon Mama let them walk to the post office and ask for the superintendent’s mail. The only thing Leonie regretted was that Papa made her take the fifth grade over. She was eleven and should have been in the sixth. But she had had tonsillitis the previous winter and missed a lot of school; furthermore, Papa didn’t think much of the teacher she had had, down home at Bitterwater. Though she wept and argued and kicked the door, there was no getting around him. She went back to the fifth grade, bitterly ashamed to be the oldest one in the class. However, there was a piano teacher in Shawano, and Papa let her take lessons. This helped considerably. She felt that she had come into the cultural advantages for which she was destined.
As for Callie, she hardly had time to decide whether she liked the new life or not. Living in town took more washing and ironing and much more sewing. There were new curtains to make; the girls needed new dresses; and the week scarcely went by when she wasn’t making a costume. A witch’s hat, a Pilgrim suit, wings for a Christmas angel. She never saw the like of programs and exercises that went on at the schoolhouse. She complained to Matthew and said there was plenty going on at the church without so many doings at school. But he said the community expected it of him, it stimulated community spirit. She supposed this was true; though there was hardly a mother she talked to who wouldn’t have welcomed a little less spirit if it meant a little less sewing.
She was glad to be busy, however, as it gave her a good excuse not to socialize. Among these people situations always arose in which she didn’t know how to act, situations she couldn’t anticipate. On her own ground she would have known exactly what to do and done it or not, as it pleased her. But you can depart from the rules only when you know them well, and since she had not yet learned the new ones, she was not always sure what was expected of her.
There was, for example, the situation with the delivery boy.
Matthew had a telephone installed, one of the few in town, and it was Callie’s special pleasure, when she needed groceries, to call up the store and order them sent out. Within half an hour they would arrive at her back door, delivered by an angelic simpleton so grateful to have been of service that you felt you had done him a great favor by ordering a sack of flour. This cheerful minion, whose last name was Dumpson, was known throughout the town as Clabber, because of the albino tint of his hair and eyebrows and the faint fuzz above his lip. He drove a small two-wheel cart drawn by a horse named Maude, an animal as stiff and slow and dependable as her master. You would hear them for minutes coming down the street, the creaking of wheels, the leisurely clop-clop of Maude’s hooves in the dust. Then Clabber would shuffle around the house, whistling to himself, and summon you with a light knock. You would find him waiting beyond the screen with a smile of beatitude.
Callie’s heart opened to him on his first visit. She went so far as to allow Mathy to ride with him to the end of the block. She was afraid, however, that she had been too friendly, for on subsequent trips Clabber showed a tendency to stay and visit. Oh, as polite as you could ask for, not sitting down or getting in the way, merely standing there, just inside the door, cap in hand, nodding and smiling and now and then getting out a comment that made remarkable sense. She hadn’t the heart to send him right off, and didn’t really want to. But she was not sure the neighbors would think the association proper. Only when she learned that Clabber Dumpson visited lengthily in every kitchen in town did she accept him formally in hers. She began to ply him with cake and cookies. He brought her news from downtown. They exchanged opinions on human nature and the weather and enjoyed each other comfortably in the manner of good servant and master, each of whom knows where the boundary lies.
Callie found such a relationship completely to her liking. It roused her sense of noblesse and restored to her, brighter than before, her dream of living in style some day in a fine white house on the corner, with a woman to come and do the wash and a boy to trim the hedge.
With his family and himself happily adjusted, Matthew dared to conclude that the move had been a wise one. He thought of it gratefully one noon hour early in the fall as he walked to town. It was a beautiful day, crisp and golden and soft in the middle, like a fried apple pie. Moreover, it was payday. His first check from Shawano lay in his inside pocket. Buoyed by sunlight and a sense of well-being, he walked down the street with a light step. A pretty woman, mother of one of his pupils, came out on a porch to greet him. A merchant on his way home to dinner stopped to shake his hand. Waving and smiling—prosperous, accepted, consequential—Matthew made his way to the bank.
Having deposited his check, he crossed the street to pay the grocery bill. For the first time in his life, and only at the grocer’s insistence, he had become a credit customer. It still puzzled him that charging things was looked on as a sign of affluence and not indigence, and he was relieved to find the store empty except for the proprietor.
“Good morning, good morning, Professor!” The grocer came forward from the cool brown depths of the store, up the aisle between the bean sacks and pickle barrel and the glass-lidded cookie boxes tilted in their racks. “What can I do for you, Professor?”
“Well-sir-now!” said Matthew, shaking hands. “You can tell me what I owe you, Mr. Henshaw. If the wife hasn’t run up the bill too high, why, maybe I can pay it!”
“Yessir, yessir now! I declare!” said Mr. Henshaw, still wringing Matthew’s hand. “These women keep us humpin’, don’t they, Professor!” He clapped Matthew on the shoulder.
“Yes, yes, they do.”
“That’s right. Got to get up and go to keep the womenfolks supplied. Why, I tell my wife, where does it all go! She sends me to work ever’ mornin’ with a list as long as your arm. Clabber’s old horse can’t hardly pull the load. And I don’t know what she does with all of it. I’m sure I don’t eat it!” He slapped his solid round belly.
“Why,” said Matthew, “anyone can see that!” The two of them laughed. “Well, let’s see what she’s cost me.”
Mr. Henshaw took the sheaf of bills off a wire hook. “Here you are, Professor. You run over these figures now, to see if I’ve added right. I wouldn’t want to cheat a schoolteacher—not the first time, anyway.”
Matthew smiled. “I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Henshaw. I’d never question it. Well, now, this doesn’t look so bad. I guess I can afford it this time.”
He walked back to the meat block to write a check, while Mr. Henshaw collected lagniappe from the candy case—gumdrops, lemondrops, and long coconut strips starred and striped like a flag. A farmer in straw hat and overalls came through the door. “Howdy, Orville,” said Mr. Henshaw.
“Christamighty, Walt,” said the farmer, pushing back his hat. “What’d you let it get so hot fer?”
“ ’Tis right warm for this time of year.”
“Let me have a sack of Bull Durham, Walt.”
The screen door opened again and a big-boned woman in crackling skirts and a monumental sunbonnet strode in. “Walter?” she said in a deep musical voice that rang through the store—one of those voices you can hear in a crowd, even when it murmurs. “I’ve come for my groceries. Isn’t that boy of yours back yet?”
“Not yet,” Mr. Henshaw apologized. “My goodness, Mrs. Gunn, I’m sorry about this. I kept thinkin’ Clabber’d be back any minute, and I was going to send him right out with your order. Tell you what I’ll do—I’ll fix you up another one right now. It’s a shame you had to come and get it yourself.”
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“Oh, it’s not far. I’d a-waited, but Roy’s home, waitin’ dinner, and I’m plumb out of lard.”
“Well, let me get busy here and fix you up.” He started toward the back. “Mrs. Gunn, have you met Professor Soames?”
“No, I haven’t!” said the lady, advancing on Matthew. She seized his hand with a manly grip. “I’m just mighty pleased to meet you. My children are out of school, but everybody tells me we’ve got a mighty good man up there this year.”
“Well, now, that’s mighty pleasant to hear,” said Matthew.
“You wanted three pounds, was it?” said Mr. Henshaw, dipping lard.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gunn, “that’s enough, this kind of weather. If I keep it any time at all, it gets old-tastin’.”
“My boy lost his horse this mornin’,” Mr. Henshaw explained to Matthew.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Oh, I don’t mean she died! She’s lost—strayed, stolen—something like that. Anyhow, she ain’t around. Must have wandered off somewhere while she was waitin’ for Clab. You know how long it takes him to get in a house and get out again. Clab’s been out lookin’ for her more’n an hour. I haven’t got any order delivered since ten-thirty this mornin’.”
“Is that right!”
“That’s why Mrs. Gunn has to come down and carry her own. I sent him out, right after she called. He had another stop to make on the way, and when he come out, old Maude was gone, wagon and all. He can’t find hide nor hair of her.”
The Moonflower Vine Page 21