But he digressed. He looked up at the heat waves that shimmered over the bottom field. It was very still down here, so still that he could hear an accordion playing in the distance, a distressing sound, like someone trying to laugh through tears.
With a sigh, he fitted the rock back into place, picked up the spade, and started toward the house.
Callie
1
The redbird said Richard! three times in a row, making clean cuts in the stillness. Callie opened her eyes. It was morning. The wallpaper’s satin stapes glowed in the pale light. At the windows the white lace lapped the air slowly. More birds awoke. Bluejays, a mockingbird. There was a scurry of wings in the cedar and the nasal chrk-chrk of a robin. The day came alive with such grace, unhurried and sweet and certain. Nothing remained of night but the still feeling, and that was not properly of the night at all, but of the morning. Night was full of murmurs and stirrings, itchings in the grass, and the tired mind talking and talking endlessly to itself. At night the mind said I am old and mumbled long-forgotten tiresome sorrows, until sleep crumbled like an old wall and buried the sound. Peace and stillness were part of the early dawn, with only the birds to say how quiet it was.
How she loved the summer, when the nights passed quickly and the mornings were long—summer, when the children came home. She allowed herself to think of it at last. Today they were coming! She had held the thought back, saving it up to make it last longer. They had such a little time together. Even the looking forward must be prolonged, savored a little at a time. In two weeks they would go away again, taking the summer with them. Each time it was a death to her. But now, at the start, she would close her mind to that and pretend they would stay forever. The pain of their going was never so great as the joy of their arrival.
Matthew had not yet wakened. He lay with his lean old body curled inside his nightshirt, his knees drawn up. Even in sleep he seemed alert. He slept so busily, wearing his little frown of concentration, the eyes closed with effort, the brows drawn together. All their daughters wore this same look. Not any of them cared much for sleeping; daylight and doing were important to them.
She pulled the sheet over his shoulders and got out of bed. At the washstand she poured water into the bowl and dropped her nightgown to her waist. Her body was thin and old but firm enough even yet and smooth, except where one breast had been cut away and the flesh stitched together in a fine seam. She washed the spot gently, wincing at the touch of the cool water. The scar no longer spread fear and resentment through her. It had become a sort of medal on her chest, a decoration for bravery, which she could think of now with a certain satisfaction and even a touch of wry amusement. Matthew, half suspecting a judgment on him, had suffered all her pain and a good deal of his own. He had been a little foolish in his day and he felt guilty. Poor Matthew. So easily led on, always losing his head and his heart. She knew him well. He had been faithful, she was sure of that. But a good part of his loyalty was caution. Timid, foolish, aggravating man. And yet (turning to look at the gray head on the pillow) when she thought of God, she saw Him in Matthew’s image. Loving him, she stood for a moment watching him sleep, then folded the towel and began to dress.
The fresh-air, hot-ironed smell of her clothes filled her with pleasure. She combed her short white hair and put on her glasses. The alarm had not yet gone off. She took the clock from the what-not shelf and turned off the button. Matthew would wake up in good time. The shelf held a collection of little vases, doll dishes, dime-store bric-a-brac, which the girls had given each other long ago. Among them were two hounds and a fox, three separate figures carved in wood. As she set the clock down, she gave the little fox a nudge, widening the distance between him and the hounds. The clock said twenty till six.
Downstairs, the kitchen lay cool and shadowy, still asleep. She thought of the jostle and hullabaloo that would fill it later. The children were coming home! As she stepped out on the back porch, she caught the faint odor of tobacco, an effluvium alien to this place. She shot an anxious glance at the screen door to see that it was hooked. Reassured, she looked out, wondering what man could have come here at this hour. But there had been no man. On the doorstep sat a stone jar covered with clean muslin. She smiled in relief. A friend had come and gone. Miss Hagar had been here, smoking her little pipe. She opened the door and looked inside the jar. There were two plump pullets dressed to the last pin-feather. Miss Hagar must have been up since dawn, with a fire built in the back yard under the kettle, and her cow waiting to be milked; she had walked the two miles with her offering before anyone should be awake to thank her. The good old woman, with no one of her own. She wanted to be part of this homecoming. And so she should be. (Though, guiltily, Callie wondered when; she was so jealous of the children in the short time they were home.)
She carried the chicken inside to the icebox. She could save her fat hen and bake it later on. Maybe they would have chicken salad. That would please Leonie. Fixy fussy Leonie, wanting everything just so. Callie smiled to herself. Well, everything was just so, the linen tablecloths done up, the candles bought, and the silver holders polished till they gave back the kitchen stove. You couldn’t find the food in front of you, by candlelight. But it would make Leonie happy.
She went outside and down the path, pausing by the smokehouse to count the moonflower pods. Another day or two and they would be ready to bloom. The flowers were so lovely, and they lasted so short a time. It was almost like the children’s visit, something you looked forward to all year, then it came, and you enjoyed it so much, and then it was over, in no time. Maybe that’s the way it should be. She thought she wanted them home all the time, but maybe she didn’t, really. Everything in its own season. If they were always here, she wouldn’t have so much to look forward to.
“I must give Leonie some seeds,” she reminded herself. Leonie could plant them next summer alongside her new fence. That fence! Callie shook her head, smiling. Started two years ago, abandoned halfway across the yard; Leonie had pieced it out with hollyhocks, to hide the mess behind it—the wrecks of cars that Ed hauled home from the garage and puttered with in his spare time. It made Leonie so cross. They had had their troubles, those two. (The depression, Ed out of a job, Soames on the way, Peter back home with his grandparents most of the time. Then the war, Ed in Kansas City again, working in the plants; and Leonie teaching a country school, living in a rented room with little Soames.) But they were doing better now. Mismatched though they were, Leonie and Ed seemed to need each other, like a churn and dasher. They got along all right. But Leonie and Soames were a different matter. It was a pitiful thing; Leonie liked her sister’s child more than her own, and Soames knew it better than she did. It made them do things to each other that neither of them could forgive. But across the gap that lay between them, they loved each other. Now Soames was going away, and he was afraid. Yet he had to go. He had to fly the planes. It was something his father had done and Peter hadn’t. And there was Leonie, seeing him slip away, trying to reach him before the time ran out.
Poor Leonie. Poor little boy. Callie sighed as she passed the garden (making a mental note that the beans needed picking). Children want to love their parents, but parents make it so hard sometimes. She was guilty of that herself, no doubt. Looking back, she could see mistakes. Still and all, maybe she hadn’t done too bad. The children had left, but they found their own way back. Like the old nursery rhyme, “Leave them alone and they’ll come home.” The hardest thing in the world was to leave them alone.
She had learned that first with Jessica. She was still learning, with Mary Jo. She thought of her youngest daughter and felt again that familiar need to reach out and protect her. But Mary Jo was the hardest of all to reach. The years between them were so many, and the child felt so worldly wise. Such a knowing child, so full of reasons and argument. “But Mama, you’re so old-fashioned! Times have changed since you were a girl…. But Mama darling, that’s so middle-class! You just don’t understand….” And all sor
ts of fancy words and notions out of books. She was worse than Leonie, that way. Sometimes Callie felt like a stranger to her youngest. Every year there was less they could say to each other.
What the child did away off in that city, how she lived, who her friends were—all this surpassed Callie’s understanding. The dangers alone she could imagine clearly, and she feared for her lamb. The girl was smart and educated and all that, but she was also a little foolish, like her father; easily taken in; no judgment at all; as happy as a lark if someone admired her, even some poor squinting boy; so eager to be loved. She could be hurt so easily, and maybe she had been, and there was so little Callie could do.
“But today she’ll be home!” she said joyfully to a rooster, who had pranced down the path. “Today we’ll see her and know she’s all right! Get out of the garden, you scamp. Shoo!”
She flapped her apron at him and walked back through the yard. In the barnlot the cows lay big and soft in the morning shadows. One of them rose and came toward the fence, chewing thoughtfully.
“You’ll be milked pretty soon,” Callie assured her. “Though I don’t know where I’ll put all the cream,” she went on, counting in her head all the crocks of milk waiting in the icebox. “I’ll have to churn again this morning. Maybe we’ll take some butter to old Mr. Corcoran. We haven’t looked in on him all week. Well, good morning, sir!” she said, as a glossy bull strolled through the lot. She watched the rhythmic sheen of his plump flanks. Matthew was proud of his fine red bull.
Away to the south, beyond Little Tebo, a high meadow had caught the sunlight. It glowed above the dark line of the woods. Soon now the sun would take the walnut grove and send yellow runnels among the trees. It was pretty down there. “I’ll go and pick berries,” she said aloud. Matthew liked them with thick cream for breakfast. It wouldn’t take long, and he had not yet come down.
Taking her small berry bucket, she set off through the pasture. The blackberries ripened late this year, due to the rain. But now they were fat and glossy and tumbled off the stem at a touch. Though her bucket filled promptly, she did not turn back at once, but wandered farther down the slope, considering the fine green morning. The broad leaves of the oak trees glistened; the willows made a soft haze down by the slew. Beyond them the cornfield rippled as she imagined an ocean might. Little Tebo had flooded in the spring, but who would believe it now? She recalled the thick brown water spread in a sullen lake on the bottom fields; it retreated slowly, leaving fences down, and bundles of drifted trash, sticks and cornstalks and dead perch. It had been a cold wet spring and a wet cool summer. But now it had turned fine. And better too much rain, she thought, than the droughts they had had in the thirties, when the sun flooded the land day after day, washing away the green, leaving its residue of burnt leaves, brittle grass, withered fruit, and dust. Hot autumn by the middle of July. Nothing came in reasonable measure, it seemed, not water or sunshine or sorrow. But joy, too, is immoderate sometimes, and that makes up for the rest.
She walked on slowly, musing on joy and sorrow, the seasons, and the passing of time. Odd memories slipped through her mind half-heeded…Mathy, no more than three, finding a new calf in the thicket, its eyes no softer or more surprised at the world than hers (twenty years now since Mathy died, yet she seemed still to be here—among those trees yonder or just across the hill). She thought of Jessica and Leonie, tiny things gathering flowers for their Maybaskets…bluebells, Sweet William, and verbenas…the time the crazy cow chased her up the branch; a poor lunatic of a thing, who bucked and kicked, when they tied her up, and finally hung herself in the barn…. Early like this, things came back to you—your childhood, the old hill farm, an empty house.
She stopped on the path, puzzled by a vague feeling of sadness. A little wind had passed through the oak leaves, recalling…what? Echoes of voices all but forgotten, children’s voices…’way down in the pasture, we ’can hear them sing. What was it? So lost and long ago. She had cried. Someone she had loved…’way down in the pasture— Two little boys, that’s who it was, two lonely little boys at a pasture fence, straining their ears for the sound of singing over the fields and far away.
A sob escaped her as she stood there on the path. Her little brothers, brown-eyed boys like puppies, tumbling and awkward and underfoot and wistful; half-brothers, they were, children of the bitter woman her father married late. Callie had helped raise them. And she loved those little boys. But she had gone away and left them, she and all her sisters, left them with a mother who didn’t want them and a father too distraught to care. Ma won’t let us go to church…Sunday and friendliness, laughter, and children to play with! Ma won’t let us go…but ’way down in the pasture, we can hear them sing.
Fifty years gone by, and she was weeping for them still. Thaddeus was dead now and Wesley an old man. And the Lord knows if either of them had ever got nearer the singing. Maybe that was the way it went, that all your life you heard the singing and never got any closer. There were things you wanted all your life, and after a while and all of a sudden, you weren’t any closer than you ever were and there was no time left.
She looked up at the bright sky. I am seventy, she said to herself. Seventy was old. How many more years did she have? Ten? Her mind ran backward over the ten years past. But ten was no time at all! It was so short—over, like that! Was another ten years all she could expect? She would be eighty then, a very old lady. In just that little time. And where was the fine white house on the corner, where her mind had lived all these years? And the trim green hedge and the rock garden in the yard? How—in just ten years?
And was this all, then? All she was to have? She turned slowly. Branch, field, creek, timber, the long slope of the pasture, the barn roof beyond. This and a few small towns were her world, all she was likely to know.
“I always meant to see the ocean!”
She said it aloud and in some surprise, as, for the first time, it occurred to her that she might not see the ocean, or do a number of things which she had intended to do.
“I never learned to read,” she said, and alone there in the pasture, she dropped her head in shame. She could make out no more words than you found in a recipe, and not all of those. She had never really read the Bible. She only looked at the pages, reciting to herself the verses which she knew from much hearing, taking comfort from the feel of the big book in her hands. She had never let them know. Soothing her deception, she had promised herself that next week she would learn to read, just as soon as the house was cleaned and the ironing done. She was always so busy. And now she was seventy. In the time left, she was not likely to read, no more likely than she was to see the ocean. The future lay suddenly blank as a prairie. From here there was nothing to look forward to. Nothing but heaven.
And for all she knew, there might even not be that! She stirred uneasily. Oh, there was a heaven, all right; she was sure of that. But now that she’d come bang up against it, she was not at all sure she would get there. Always before, she had thought she would; she had taken it for granted, trusting her prayers and penitence to save her. But they might not. On the Day of Reckoning, heaven too could dissolve away, like the ocean and the fine white house.
She stood in the still pasture, thunder and lightning of the Last Judgment rumoring around her. Awed to silence, the mind stopped making words, and an old, old memory rose softly, as fresh and living as if it had not lain buried these many years. In its presence, the woods around her changed to a spring woods, and the air took on a tenderness felt only now and then in a lifetime. She remembered it clearly. And that was forty years ago.
2
It was April. School had not yet let out. Matthew rode off each morning to Renfro, where he was the high school teacher, and home again after dusk. The longer the days, the longer he stayed in town. Though he had plenty to do on the farm, he seemed to take little interest. Ordinarily, in the spring, he bloomed like a tree and went about full of new vigor and singing. This time he did what he had to in a dogged manner.
He was gloomy and silent, cross with Callie and the children. They hardly dared speak to him half the time, and when they did, he didn’t half hear them. He had had spells like this before; they often came at this time of year, when he had lots on his mind. But this time there seemed something more. Callie thought of his brother who had wasted away of consumption, and she was terrified that Matthew had caught the disease. It made little difference that he protested he was well. She continued to worry and watch him closely for any fatal sign.
Something was the matter, of that she was sure. He was changed in some way. He took no pleasure in the children and none in her. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to avoid her. It came to her at last, with a wounding surprise, that there was another woman. Someone he saw every day. It had to be that. What else but a woman could have taken away her husband and replaced him with this stranger?
She was as curious as she was hurt. Who in the world could it be? She went over in her mind every woman and girl in the countryside, convinced by plain reason that it was none of these. Though she was not precisely vain, she knew her own worth; she was as smart as any female of their acquaintance and prettier than most, and she had a way about her. No girl had ever taken a man away from her. If any taking was done, she had done it. Who could it be who was turning the tables on her? Some town woman, no doubt; a silly creature who would turn his head and just as quickly drop him. She knew that kind of woman. Men caught them like spring colds. But they didn’t last. Come summer, he’d get over it. She was certainly not going to make a fuss. That’s what men hoped you would do. It made them feel important. It also gave them something to hold against you. And she wasn’t going to give him that! If he had to stray, it would be his own doing; he could not say that she drove him.
The Moonflower Vine Page 34