Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  It was dawn. When she opened her eyes the low ceiling seemed close, like a dim sky. The small room was full of pale quiet light. She raised her head and leaned upon her arm and looked out of the window.

  Bart had said, brusque with embarrassment, “What side you want to sleep on?” and she answered quickly, “Outside—next the window, please.” He was ready before she was and he had rolled heavily to the wall. She had looked at the window all the time she was getting ready. It was a window away from this room, a window toward the hills.

  There the hills were now, dark and still under the faintly coloring sky. She looked at them with a quiet wintry sadness. This was the way old people must feel, as she felt this morning, very old people, from whom everything had been taken away, or who knew that now nothing more was to be theirs. Nothing more now was to be hers except the things old people may have, a roof for shelter from rain, a fire for warmth, food, sleep, and within their hearts the emptiness of no more to come. All the emptiness in life was inside her, nothing but emptiness. She was a hollow figure, standing alone in a great silent empty plain. No one was near—no ear to hear her, no voice which she could hear. Behind her she heard the rasping steady breathing of Bart. Now that he was at last asleep he slept thickly, lumpishly. She must not look at him, must not imagine how he looked. Here was the window through which she could see the hills.

  She crept carefully out of the bed and into her clothes. When she was dressed she knelt beside the window and watched the changing light. Let her not think, let her not remember anything. But she remembered suddenly one thing. Once when she was a little girl and she heard that quarreling in the room next to hers—were they quarreling?—she had got up out of bed, troubled, quivering, to listen at the door, to know what was wrong. She heard her mother say in a small, death-like voice, almost a whisper, “Is this all? Paul, is there nothing more than this?” And her father had answered more sharply than she had ever heard him speak, “I don’t know what you mean, Mary.”

  But she knew what her mother had meant. This morning she knew.

  “You up already?” Bart’s sleepy voice came suddenly from the wall.

  “Yes, I’m up, Bart.”

  He yawned loudly. “I’m awful sleepy this morning. Guess I’ll take another nap.”

  “All right, Bart.”

  … What could she pour into such emptiness to fill it? There was nothing deep enough to fill it to the bottom. Everything she did was so small it only floated on the surface of the fathomless emptiness. She watched the dawn brighten, and slowly the hills turned blue and over their rim the edge of the red sun rose and swelled into roundness and light poured over the land. Day was here again. Her frantic body was nothing in the hugeness of the day and night. This shell of walls and roof were all she had for shelter from the moons and suns and roaring winds or racing million stars, and from all the carelessness of people passing by. She turned from the window and began to unpack her bag and put her clothes away into the drawers.

  In the days, she learned to work as she never had. She wasted no time on talk. Words echoed too hollowly in that void. She learned to be as silent as the others were, as chary of unnecessary speech.

  “Bart, what time are you getting up to plow the wheatfield?”

  “Half past four.”

  No use to say more than that. Half past four meant breakfast at five. And before breakfast there must be the praying and Bible reading. She sat in stillness, dawn after dawn, staring out of the dusky windowpane while Bart’s father read the Bible, one verse after the other, following the lines with his thick cracked fingertip. She dreaded the deepest winter when the window would be black and she could not see the hills lightening with morning. But deepest winter came and then all she could see in the window was only a mirror. In it she saw five people sitting about a shrouded table, their heads patiently inclined. She saw herself one of them and she turned her head away.

  Setting the cold skim milk on the table, the cold bread, the pat of pale milky butter, she watched the window, watched for the dawn. It seemed sometimes it would never come. Sometimes they had eaten what there was to eat—eggs were not to be eaten because they could be sold, and coffee was an indulgence, a strong drink with which to indulge the flesh—and she was washing the dishes, before that light began to break, streaming over the hills like music.

  … Music! She had forgotten there was music. Behind one of the closed doors there was an old upright piano. She touched it once, softly. But its faint notes jangled and twanged out of tune and she closed it. Sometimes Bart’s father came into the kitchen on a Saturday night where she and Bart’s mother sat in silence mending the clothes the men wanted to put on after their weekly baths.

  “Here,” he said gruffly, “see if you can pick out that tune.” He had a shining red hymnbook open to his hand. He had to choose hymns because he was superintendent of the Sunday school, as he had been for thirty years. The mother rose, sighing, and took the book and went to the piano. Behind her he stomped, stocking-footed, grumbling. “Since they went and got these new hymnbooks I can’t go by the old words anymore.”

  She heard the warped tune wavering in the cold other room, a treble picked out with one finger. She waited for silence or for a shout: “Never heard such a heathenish dancy tune!” But if it was what he wanted, there was only silence. Silence was his thanks for anything, and his only praise.

  … Once she had tried to be gay, for she was so made that she could not keep from growing a little fond of what she must care for, and once she said to the mother on a Sunday morning, “You look nice in that brown coat.”

  The mother looked half-frightened and shy to sickness, and Joan smiled, still trying to be gay. “Didn’t anyone ever say you looked nice before—not even him?” She nodded toward the father.

  But he stared at her, his mouth a grim, wide line across his jaw, bewildered by her gaiety.

  “I hate polite talk,” he said. “It’s not honest. I expect my wife to look right. If she doesn’t, I tell her so.”

  On that day they had gone to the church as they did every Sunday. Through snow and rain and wind they went as steadily as through sunshine, and Bart’s father whipped up the horses, worried that he must, because it was the Sabbath and these were his beasts. Once, reading in a chill dawn, he came to the Commandments. “Thou and thy beast,” he read, and suddenly he paused and whipped off his spectacles and looked about at them. “I wish it had gone on and said how to rest the beast on Sunday when you have to go to church.” He stared at them, one after the other, and the light from the oil lamp fell on his lined anxious face. Joan saw in that moment’s light the troubled puzzling of many years spring into his deep-set grayish eyes. Every Sunday morning he had waked to it.

  Sam mumbled, his small red eyes lighting under the clownish thatch of his hair, “Pity it doesn’t mention a car!”

  But his father glared at him. “You and your making jokes of everything,” he shouted suddenly.

  Sam bristled feebly. “Well, a joke’s no harm that I can see. Anybody’d think a joke in this house was a sin!”

  “Shut up,” his father bellowed.

  “Abram, Abram,” the mother broke in, “and you with God’s word open on your knee!”

  In the silence he began to read again, his burden still upon him. He fretted constantly because he could not find ways of literally obeying what he read.

  And none of these things filled the emptiness within her. Now she knew where every dish and spoon belonged and where the rooms must be brushed and wiped and she knew the secret of every room, the parlor where they never sat, unless some relative came to see them. …

  “This is my son’s wife Joan, this is Bart’s Aunt Emma.”

  “Uh-huh, well, I heard Bart was married, but I didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

  Aunt Emma’s black eyes stared at her out of an enormous fat face, as expressionless as the underside of a pie. “You’re a right hefty somebody, aren’t you? Almost as tall as Bart! Is
she a good cook, Minna?”

  “I do the cooking.” Bart’s mother said stiffly, and added unwillingly, “She’s handy, though, about the house.”

  “Who were her folks?”

  Her folks! Had she once had people of her own, who had been hers and whose she was?

  Bart, called in from the stable to see his Aunt Emma, said shortly. “Her father was the old preacher over at Middlehope.”

  “I heard tell of him,” said Aunt Emma. “Folks said he was a little off.”

  “My father?” Joan gasped.

  “Nothing but his age and all, I reckon,” said Aunt Emma placatingly, and Joan saw this woman did not mean to be unkind. But still she was stabbed. So people had spoken of her father!

  There was the dark parlor, where they never went, not even on Christmas Day. … But then, what was Christmas in this house of silence? There was a tree at the Sunday school in Chipping Corners on Christmas Eve. Christmas fell that year on a Sunday and the horses must take them, Bart’s father said, to what was no better than a merrymaking on the Sabbath. But it was not so very merry. The tree was a slightly crooked pine, sparsely scattered with tinsel from a ten-cent store. But there was a star, a white paper star, stitched around the edges with tinsel, and Bart’s father read the story of the star, and the children came forward, the pinched frightened-looking farm children who worked early and late at chores, and the smug little children of small village storekeepers, with here and there among them the angelic face of a child who would never belong anywhere. Looking at one of these, a little brown-haired girl, staring at the few candles upon the tree, dreaming them into hundreds, Joan saw herself. She watched the little girl, smiling, catching from the child’s eyes a solitary gleam of Christmas. She made her way to the little girl’s side and said, “Merry Christmas!” But the words were strange to the child. She did not know the greeting. She pointed a thin little finger at the tree and cried out, “That there one is a-fallin’!” She drew close while Joan straightened the candle, and stared on, lonely and entranced.

  So they came back to the farmhouse. They sat down to a better dinner than usual—roast pork and baked apples, and for dessert a bread pudding with raisins. She had made little gifts. She took some of her money and spent it, not for them, but for Christmas—wool for a pair of slippers she crocheted for the father, silk for a knitted green tie for Sam, and a brown one for Bart, and for the mother a handkerchief with a bit of lace at the edge.

  She had wrapped the gifts in bright paper and put them on the table. They shone gaily red on the white cotton cloth, but no one spoke or seemed to see them, and at last she could not keep from saying, “Aren’t you going to look at your presents?” Then, one by one, clumsily, shyly, almost unwillingly, they took the packages and opened them, all except the father, who left his unopened. The mother said, “I don’t know how to thank you, I’m sure.”

  Sam said, grinning at her intimately, “Green’s my girl’s favorite color. If it had been blue now, I’d have given it back to you.”

  Bart said, “Is that what you’ve been doing every night on the sly, sitting up when you ought to have been in bed!”

  The father, because the unopened package was so large upon the table, put it on the floor under his chair. After he had eaten he took it with him and went upstairs and when he came down he wore the slippers.

  “Do they fit you?” she asked, wistfully.

  “A mite short, but I can wear them,” he answered.

  Without speaking she went upstairs to the cold bedroom and shut the door and sat by the window and looked over the gray hills. A year ago today they had gathered in the pine-scented church where her mother lay dead under the Christmas star. It was very long ago. Her mother was locked away into the earth, into all that was gone forever.

  That little girl, dreaming the few candles into hundreds upon the scanty Christmas tree this morning in the bare little church!

  She could not keep down her heart, after all. It would come up like a bubble in a breeze whenever she forgot. And she forgot very often. She forgot in the joy of snow. There was the old childish rush of pleasure over snow, the soft wide whiteness of the new earth. She put on her boots and her old red leather coat and plowed through the woods in an ecstasy. Then the universe shrank small and warm about her and she was not lonely, not for this moment. And the snow melted and underneath were small green plants, leafing and sprouting and ready. In the afternoons, when the work was over, there were waiting for her the hidden rosy buds of arbutus and the pearly whiteness of bloodroot. She could bear the loneliness in the house, thinking of all that was waiting for her in the intimacy of the earth over which she wandered alone and was not lonely. She took pleasure in small things, small flowers and small curious stones and in little dells. She discovered valleys, named them to herself: “My dell where I found the dogtooth violets”; “My pool—” But she avoided the pale tremendous largeness of earth and sky at dawn, and twilight, and at night she drew the shades because the sky was so wide and glittering with the cold far stars.

  So the year passed, and another Christmas, and she gathered to herself all she could possess to fill her emptiness.

  And she still had something of her own to put into her emptiness. Rose and Francis were alive. They were some where in the world and so they belonged to her. Early in the new year Rose wrote from across the seas that she was soon to have a baby. When the letter came, Joan put her hand to her lips to press them shut. She must have her part in this. She wanted Rose’s baby, too. And Rose must come home now. She could come here—this was her home and Rose could come to it and have her baby.

  She planned quickly. It was a good place to have a baby, quiet and clean; and there were the hills. It would be spring when the baby was born and she could set a basket out under the trees. She curved her arms, feeling Rose’s baby in them. Rose wouldn’t know how to take care of a baby. She laughed aloud—Rose with a baby! Someone must be told. She ran to find Bart. He was in the field, building a stone wall.

  “Rose is going to have a baby,” she cried, waving the thin foreign sheets at him. “I must write to her to come home—”

  He went on lifting the stones. There was this stretch of wall and another before sundown. “You know how Ma is,” he said.

  “You mean—she wouldn’t want Rose?”

  He laid a stone in silence before he spoke. “She always took kids hard,” he said heavily. There were some women who came out into the fields and helped, but Joan didn’t seem to think of it. Well, no one should say he wasn’t good to her. “We never could have the other kids home after school much,” he went on. “She always took them as work. She was always afraid of the muss they might make in the house.”

  Something in his voice made her suddenly see Bart, a small overworked boy with no chance to play. She looked at him for the first time, instantly moved by the little child she saw.

  “Didn’t she ever invite any children over—to a party or something?”

  “We never had a party,” he said slowly, striking a rough stone into pieces. “She was afraid of the trouble, and he was afraid of our learning something sinful.”

  “Didn’t anyone ever invite you?” she asked, troubled. When she had been a child a party was nothing—her mother would cry in gaiety. “Let’s have a party!” And almost at once there was a party, the house full of noisy children, prancing about, dressed up, an orchestra blowing on combs and drumming on tin pans.

  “You don’t keep getting asked if you never ask,” said Bart.

  … In the kitchen she said to the stout pale woman sitting eternally by the kitchen stove, “My sister Rose is going to have a baby—I’m so happy!”

  Bart’s mother sighed. “Children are a lot of trouble. They mess the house up.”

  “Weren’t you glad when your children were born?” Joan asked, angry for that little boy.

  “They’re good,” she answered. “They’ve always been good boys. But they’ve made work. I got so I just couldn’t make p
ie for them. It seemed too much to work for a long time and roll out the pie and see them eat it in a few minutes as quick as though they was drinking milk. I gave up making pie in their teens. Three men can eat up a whole pie at once and your work’s gone for nothing, seems like. It didn’t seem necessary.”

  She sighed again, in the midst of the clean kitchen.

  “But my sister is coming home …” Joan began again. She would not give up quite so easily as this.

  Then she thought of a key to open the door of this house to Rose. Once a month in the middle of the week Bart’s mother put on her second-best black dress and one of the boys or Bart’s father hitched up and drove her to the church to a missionary meeting. Joan never wanted to go. She always said, “I’ll have supper ready for you when you come back.” But once or twice she had gone and sat quietly through the meeting. It was like all the others she had known, the good mothers sewing, listening to tales of famine and flood and falling down before idols, their eyes absorbed, turned inwardly upon their houses, upon the house where each must be back for supper. There was the tinkling dribble of small silver and copper coins and it was all over. Still they went, since it was a duty.

  “You know—did I tell you?—that Rose and her husband are missionaries?”

  “Yes, you did tell me,” Bart’s mother said. “I always thought it kind of queer that you never cared more about the meetings, they being missionaries themselves. Well, I guess I’ll stir the potatoes. Does seem as if mealtimes come round quicker than anything could.”

  She rose from her seat by the stove, sighing.

  No, there was no room here for Rose’s baby to be born. She wrote to Rose, “If I ever have a place of my own—” For she had no place of her own, after all. She must let Rose have her baby in a foreign country.

  Into the emptiness she began to put an image of Bart. She needed an image in her emptiness and so she took a little here and there of what she had. “He’s my husband,” she said to herself. So she took fragments of Bart and shaped them with the welding of her imagination into an image. She took his size, the breadth of his shoulders and his strong neck and his length of limb. But she did not take his hands, clenched, hard, swollen, so that he could never really straighten them or never seem, when he took her hand in his, really to hold it. She took his square jaw, his close curly dark red hair. But she did not take his stiff pale lips, nor his deep-set reddish eyes. She even took his silence and made it strength. And the breath with which she breathed life into this image she made was the moment in the field when she saw him as a small awkward country boy, wanting the merriment of parties, of play, and doomed to work, to get up and milk the cows before he went to school, to milk cows and chop wood and carry feed and water to the beasts when other boys were playing ball and sledding and skating and giving and going to parties.