Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  For of course there had never been any fun in this house. There was no room in which fun could be made. The parlor was full of the old-fashioned horsehair set, the polished table, the bright rose-flowered carpet, still clean after fifty years. The sitting room was full of the jangling piano, the cabinet of shells and hair flowers and little boxes and bits of glass. Poor Bart—poor little working boy!

  She began to be kind to Bart, to talk more to him. In that silence of his, what might there not be sleeping but alive? She might find thought and imagination—if not love, perhaps thought and imagination. It would be good to find these buried under the vast silence, the silence he did not break in the day—for it was not broken by his saying, “Where’d you put my old pants?” or by her saying, “They are mended and hanging on the second hook behind the door”—which he did not break in the night, which he would not have broken if she had cried aloud what she so often cried with inward desperate tearless weeping, “Is this all, Bart? Is this all it is?” For he took her night after night, swiftly, and in the same silence in which he ate and drank or in which he fell into instant sleep.

  But sometimes in the day when she was away from him she remembered the little longing boy she saw in the field. From that little boy Bart might be born again, a man such as his father and mother had not made him.

  “Bart, would you like me to read to you sometimes?”

  “What?”

  “My books. They were in the round-topped truck I brought with me, remember? I’ve set them on a shelf in the attic. Your mother said they wouldn’t be in her way so much there.”

  “Sure.”

  He was so amiable that the image in the emptiness stirred with life. In their own room that night she opened the book she had chosen. In the afternoon, after the work was done, she had gone to the attic and had sat down and one by one she had taken down her books. Here were the books she had had in college. On a page she found Mary Robey’s name scrawled: When this you see, remember me. Yes, she remembered. It was another life—a life finished with its end. Strange how life could end abruptly and begin again, wholly different, so that one was another person! But these books, some of them her mother’s, were like a frail mesh, binding that past to this hour. Perhaps they would bind Bart and her into some sort of life together. Story of an African Farm. It had been when she first read it a troubling book, with the trouble of reality and of herself in the child on the farm. And then Miss Kinney had made Africa vivid in darkness, and she could see it all.

  She began to read to him. He sprawled upon the sheepskin rug before the empty fireplace. She began to read in a quiet even voice, eagerly. Perhaps this was the beginning of a sort of companionship. Perhaps she had not tried enough. She read on a while, and then the old sense of troubled reality came over her again out of this book. It became at last too much for her. She looked up, trembling, pleading. She laughed shyly, her eyes wet.

  “Bart, this child is so much like me that I—”

  He was asleep, deeply asleep, his mouth open. He must have been asleep a long time.

  Though she put her books away to read alone sometimes, going up the steep attic stairs to them alone, she was still kind to Bart, who was only a boy. She saw now that there was nothing more in him than what was to be seen by anyone. He could never be anything but a boy. Once reading of a man and a woman in one of her books, she found herself weeping. It was like waking from sleep to find herself weeping. It was not a surface weeping, not tears only, but some hurt in the roots of her. She was a woman now. There was no more of the girl Joan left. She knew why she wept and she said steadily to her weeping heart, “Be just. I married him for a home and for safety, and I have these two things.”

  But the book made her think of the way she used to kiss Martin Bradley. She did not love Martin Bradley. She did not want him anymore. But there had been those kisses, the only ones she had ever given any man. She did not kiss Bart. She could not kiss Bart. When he pressed her she touched his lips quickly, she kept her lips still and patient beneath his. She said to herself day after day, “I must always be just to Bart.”

  Sometimes passive in the night she thought, reproaching herself, “I have injured him. On one of the farms in these hills there would have been a woman to love him in his own way.” She remembered the farmer and the girl who had come to be married in the manse. The man was like Bart, she thought, filled with remorse. “I have deprived them both so that I might have a place for myself. I must make it up to him.”

  So she was very kind to Bart. She denied him nothing, by day or by night. She went when he called from the barn or the yard. “Bring me a pail of fresh water this morning. Jo—I’ll be in the west field.”

  “Yes, Bart.”

  “Come and see the two old hogs fight, Jo. It’s a sight to make your sides split!” She stood by the pigpen with him, watching, revolted by the angry grunting beasts.

  At night he said roughly, “Don’t you go to sleep yet, my girl.”

  “All right, Bart.”

  She had at first hated the silence of the house. It had pressed upon her, intolerable to bear. But now it was a cloak under which she could hide. She was glad for their habit of silence. Since none spoke and none revealed himself, she also need not speak nor reveal herself to any. Silence was shelter. And day and night she was kind to Bart. …

  Out of her steady determined kindness to Bart she conceived her child. She waited, breathless with joy, in a shining mist of joy, until she was sure. And then she was sure and then she was no longer alone. She was never to be alone again. She was in the full company of her child.

  So she did not need any longer the image of Bart. She could accept Bart as he was. For instead of the image there was now the reality of her child. She carried that reality with her everywhere. There was this steadily growing secret life within her. Soon, like a bud pushing daily more steadily to the light, this life would also come into the light, and she would see her child. But she held him as securely her own already as though she had him, flesh and blood, in her hands. She was not impatient, for she had him. It was enough that he was alive, growing, moving. She carried him with her into every realm of her being. He was not only in her body, he was in her heart and her mind. For him she made her life. Even when she read she put what she read consciously into his making. “That’s a lovely thought,” she would say to herself. “That I put into him.” But she needed a place for him in this house. She found an old broken armchair in the attic and mended it and made it soft with a ragged quilt and there she sat, by the small gabled window toward the west, dreaming, sending her dreams through her beating blood, her blood that was feeding and fashioning her child.

  Now she took stock of all that made her life to see what she wanted for her son. This house was to be his home, this land, these hills must for years be his home and his world. She pondered it all, everything, examined each separate part, to see what she wanted for him. Here he and she would live together, taking what they wanted, making what they had not. She would take the great shadowing sheltering trees, she would take the undulating hills, the valleys full of woods, the curious aged rocks, the stream at the edge of the cornfield, the marsh where lady’s slipper and wild iris grew, all her small private possessions. She would take the barn with its great hayloft, the cattle lowing and giving their milk.

  She would go to the barn herself and even now take the milk for him whole. When Bart’s father said, “We sell the cream,” she would say, “My baby shall have cream. It is more important for him to have cream than for it to be sold to city people.” She would take the eggs they guarded as jealously as jewels. He must have eggs every day. She began even now for him, now when her body was his source of growing. So she had had to tell them about him. She kept, it as long as she could to herself, so that in the silence she and the child could live together. But for his sake it was told.

  “Bart,” she had said one night in the bedroom when he stepped out of his blue jeans. She stooped to pick them up and
hang them on the nail behind the door. “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Are we?” he cried. She paused, astonished at his “we.” It had not come into her mind that the child was anyone’s except her own. His square unshaved face broke into a great grin. “I been wondering when that was going to happen.”

  She had gone on distinctly. “I want you to get me a quart of milk every day with all the cream in. And I want two eggs for my breakfast. The baby ought to have them.”

  He scratched his head and looked at her. “Don’t know about that—Pop’s kind of low since the fruit trees got frosted.”

  “It’s got to be, Bart,” she replied.

  “Sure,” he said amiably. “If you say so, I’ll put it up to Pop.”

  “I never coddled myself,” Bart’s mother said next day in the kitchen. “I raised the boys on skim milk all right. Folks don’t need cream. It sells good and we’re short.”

  Joan did not answer. She could use stubborn silence now, too. She went on steadily kneading bread. She had learned how to make good bread, great snowy loaves, brown crusted. Some day her little boy would run into this very kitchen, “Mother, I’m hungry.” She would answer, “Yes, my son.” She would go and cut him a full slice of the bread she had made and butter it thickly before their very eyes, and give it to him. “There’s plenty more if you want it, my son,” she would say clearly before them all. She would take ruthlessly for him.

  So now she went openly into the cellar and poured out cream and put it back into her skim milk, cream that was bottled, ready to be sold. She went to the nests in the chicken house and took what eggs she wanted. They watched her, their silence loud with astonishment and anger, so that Bart was afraid before his father and tried to placate him with extra work. Let him, she thought triumphantly, let him do that for my child.

  Only Sam said aloud, with envy and hostility, “Say, it’s luck for you, ain’t it!” His mother hushed him, outraged. “Sam, be quiet!” But it was outrage because it was not decent to know that Joan was to have a baby. It was another thing about which to be silent. Joan spoke quickly, tranquilly. “Why luck? I want my child to have a strong body, Sam.”

  But to such frankness he had no answer. He grew red and retreated into their common silence and said no more. They were shocked at her indecency. But she was not afraid of their silence anymore. She had learned how to live in it now. She took what she wanted and was not afraid.

  And then one day there was a letter for her. She had no letters these days except from Rose, for Francis did not write. He had lost himself in the world and she did not know where he was. She could only wait for him to come back. She tore at this letter quickly, for the stamp was not foreign. But it was not from Francis. The paper was stamped with the words, MINISTER’S INSURANCE DEPARTMENT. She read it quickly. There was a check pinned to the corner. Her father, the letter said, had for years carried a small insurance. Since they had not known of his death until recently there had been a delay in sending her the money. More than two years ago he had written saying his wife had died and he wished his elder daughter to have his insurance in case of his death. The check was for five hundred dollars.

  She sat down on the old stump by the mailbox. If she had had this letter before her child began to live in her—but she had not.

  She was held now to this house. She must keep this house to be a home for her child, a family into which he could be born. Money could not buy her freedom. She had taken their blood into her and mingled it with her own blood. She could never be free. She sat, gazing over the morning fields. On the hill across the valley she saw Bart plowing, small against the earth. She heard his voice crying at the horses, faint and very thin in the distance. Money could not free her. She had taken him into herself. But she would not tell him of this money. At least that would be hers. She would put it into the bank in some town where they did not go and keep it in her own name. She would know it was there if she needed it, a secret power.

  But she was jealous of Bart. As the days passed, as the child moved in her and grew, she wanted it to be all her own. Bart’s part in its creation was so little, so unconscious, so accidental.

  And Bart could not be a father when he was only a boy. He was longing for a car now, exactly as a boy longs. She listened to him. “Jo, I just got to get me a car. I got seventy dollars in cash now and my share of the pigs and pullets. I got a good notion to go on and get me a car.” He was excited by the thought, pleading for her agreement. “Don’t you think we ought to have a car? It’s so slow these days not to have one. Every fellow my age drives his own car, and it looks foolish to go to church or town in that old surrey, hitched to the plow horses. If Pop wasn’t so old-fashioned—he’s got money in the bank—I know he has.”

  She smiled in secret triumph. This great boy the father of her son! She smiled tolerantly. “Why, yes, Bart. Why not?”

  “I could get me a used car,” he said in excitement. “I could paint it up all new. Say, do you like red or blue? Maybe a nice green. I’m partial to green.”

  He went off, planning. She said to herself, “Let him have his car. It will mean more to him than the child. I can have the child to myself.”

  The next Saturday, when he came home in an old car, she went out and admired it. The owner said loudly, “He’s the quickest fellow to learn to drive I’ve ever seen. I told him a few things and he’s got the hang already.” Bart said, “Move over and let me see.” He shoved himself into the driver’s seat and studied the gears. “Let’s see—” The car moved slowly. His face grew solemnly ecstatic.

  She smiled, content. Her child was her own. It was more easy now to be pleasant, to be kind. She was very kind to them all, these days.

  But she wanted someone to whom to talk. If her mother had been alive she would have run to her. “Mother, I am going to have my child!” She could see her mother’s dark eyes go joyous in that brightness, as though an inner light had been turned on, like windows shining in the night. “Oh, my darling!” She could feel the quick warm arms about her. And she yearned for Rose and Francis. It had been so long—how had they grown so separate? She wanted to see him again. As if an answer to her longing, a letter came from Rose. Rose’s child was born, a little delicate boy, so delicate they had not dared to hope to keep him alive, but he lived. He had been born on a warm April day in a Chinese city, a fair little boy who looked like Rob. Rose had no milk for him. Her round breasts were useless, for the nipples were too small. They would not rise and the boy could not grasp them in his lips, or he was too feeble to try. So they had hired a Chinese wet nurse, a peasant woman whose baby was a girl. She was willing for money to take the girl’s milk for Rose’s little boy. “We feel only our prayers have kept him alive,” Rose wrote. Joan, reading the letter closely, longed for the frail child. She looked at her own swelling breasts proudly. If the children had been together, I believe I could have fed them both, she thought in triumph. I shall have so much—far more than enough.

  Bart’s mother said, “Reckon I can help you when your time comes. And Mrs. Potter over at Clarktown is a midwife, if anything seems out of the way.”

  But Joan said, “I’ve made my plans. I shall have Dr. Crabbe.”

  “It doesn’t seem as if you had to have a real doctor,” Bart’s mother objected. She was peeling potatoes and she looked at Joan reproachfully. “It ain’t like a sickness.”

  “He knows me,” Joan answered tranquilly.

  She was ironing a small, plain white dress she had just finished—six little dresses. Bart’s mother had said, “There’s some of Sam’s old baby clothes in the attic.”

  “No,” said Joan quickly. “No, I don’t need them.” She could not have Sam’s old garments on her little tender-fleshed son. The thought revolted her. She could not bear to touch Sam even in accidental passing. But she opened the round-topped trunk and searched over the baby dresses, the little petticoats and shoes, and the red jackets Francis had worn. They were old and much washed but still dainty
, because her mother had made them so fine of good lasting stuff and with small embroidery and tiny worked buttonholes and narrow laces.

  One day in late October she hitched an idle horse to the buggy and drove to Middlehope to see Dr. Crabbe. She chose a Monday, when people would be busy and she might meet no one. Bart said proudly, “I’ll drive you in the car if you’ll wait till the work’s done.” But she could not trust her son to his slow-witted driving. She said quietly, “I’d better go earlier, thank you, Bart.”

  So she had driven gladly alone through the still October sunshine. She had made it habit now to choose things for her son’s life. I choose these colors, she thought happily, that red vine in that oak, that yellow white-barked birch, that little gay chipmunk. Together they would see all these things, and soon, in only a year or two, they could talk about them. Then there would always be someone with whom to talk. She must watch and find out all she could, see all she could, with which to enrich his life. These hills should not imprison him, nor should the woods seem dark or frightening. He must never feel lonely in this silence. She must be always there.

  She drove into the quiet sunlit street, and past the churchyard, the church, the manse. Upon the manse steps sat two small children, a boy and a girl, eating slices of bread, staring at her as she passed. She heard a woman’s brisk voice calling, “Mollie, where’s Donny?”