Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  “We’re here,” the little girl piped back.

  “Take good care of him,” the voice answered. In the garden she saw a youngish man raking leaves, bareheaded and a little bald. It was the new minister. Monday was his holiday as it had been her father’s. But her father never raked leaves—he spent the whole day in his study, reading books he had not time for on other days or making parish calls. The new minister? He was no longer new. He was the minister now, his the house and children. It was impossible to believe that the two small children were not the ghosts of herself and Francis, so short the time was since they had sat on the steps eating bread and sugar. She could hear her mother’s voice: “Joan, where’s Francis?”

  “We’re here, Mother!”

  “All right, darling.”

  She must find Francis, she thought ardently. She took her mind from her errand to think of him, troubled, her conscience stirring. She ought not have let him go so long. But he did not write and she had no way to find him. She must send letters, many letters, send them out like arrows, until one found him and brought him home to her again. …

  In Dr. Crabbe’s office she waited, and then in a moment he was there, his hair a curly white rim about his bald crown, his blue eyes dim and rheumy, his hands shaking.

  “My goodness, it’s you, Joan Richards! Why on earth haven’t you—Where’s that Godforsaken hole you hide in, anyway? I’ve been driving all round that country seeing sick folks and never see hide nor hair of you!”

  She found her lips trembling. She wanted to cry. She wanted to cry and cry and tell Dr. Crabbe everything, to be the little girl again, to catch for a moment the warm old circle about her. But she steadied herself. No use trying to go back.

  She laughed and took his hands, feeling their shaking.

  “Dr. Crabbe, I’m going to have my baby—and I want you to help me.”

  “Well, well, well—I keep on living and living. Your mother came to me with those very words. Let’s see—sit down, child—I want to ask you a few things. Let me look at you.” She gave her body over to his hands gratefully, confidently. He peered and puffed as she remembered he always did, breathing hard as he grew absorbed.

  “There—you’ve got a glorious body, Joan—sound as an apple—no trouble at all—everything’s just beautiful. God, I like to see a good body!”

  He washed contentedly, talking cheerfully. “Old Mrs. Kinney’s not dead yet, Joan—had pneumonia last winter and I had to pull her through it, damn her! She thought sure she’d go. You know how scary she is of everything—won’t even ride in an automobile. But she got well. I swear I’m going to live to bury her. You heard Netta and Ned married, didn’t you? They’re going to have a baby next month, but she’s a different story—slack built sort of female—I don’t know what’s going to happen there—I’m dubious, that’s all, I’m dubious!”

  He asked no more questions of her until she went outside. Then he shot his white eyebrows over his eyes at her and said sharply, “You happy, Joan?”

  She smiled at him. “Why not? I’m going to have my baby.”

  And jogging home alone she began to sing. She hadn’t sung in months. Now she thought she could, if she had a little time, make a song of her own again. The tight dark isolation of her heart was over. Yes, actually, there was a song in her mouth. She held it lightly on her lips, waiting for it to shape. Here was a phrase, and here. When she reached home she went straight to the attic and found a bit of paper and put down the two lines and then a third.

  But although she waited, the end would not come. The song hung there, unfinished, and she let it be. It was a song written to a child not yet born. The end would come in its own time.

  Waiting for her baby in overflowing tenderness, she wrote to Rose more warmly than she ever had. “Tell me all about little David, I feel he is mine, too.” She tried to see the little fragile fair baby, nursed by a brown woman. She wondered about his home and the Chinese landscape. If only Rose would tell her more—she couldn’t see anything of Rose’s life. When she tried, she saw a static picture of a church, shining among dark vague temple shapes, and a stream of brown people leaving the temples, pouring into the church. But that could not be life. The work was going well, Rose said. Little David had had a fever—malaria, they thought, but he was better again. The Lord blessed them and they were receiving nearly fifty new members this year. Rob was opening new territory. The people were hostile and he went in danger of his life among them, but they were not afraid. They persisted steadily in God’s work, preaching the Gospel to unwilling ears, trusting to God for the harvest. She hoped Joan would bear her child more easily than she did. David interfered a good deal with her classes, but he would soon be older.

  I wish I had him, Joan thought, folding the pages. I could take care of him easily. I believe he bothers Rose. I can’t think of her holding a baby and bathing him and dressing him.

  But Francis never answered her letters. She thought about him while she was waiting, worrying about him because he never wrote. She seemed to see him now always as he had been when he was a small boy in a little red sweater, his eyes very black above round scarlet cheeks and his black hair curling a little at the ends. … “Joan, take Frankie with you if you are going to the Winters’ to play.” … “All right, Mother—come on, Frankie!”

  If sometimes she was impatient with his short steps and his constant tagging, one look at his face and chubby body softened her. None of the girls had a little brother so pretty. What if she’d had a pale-eyed weazened little runt like Netta’s Jackie? She was always proud to walk along the street with Frank. They might meet a stranger who would surely, say, “What a beautiful little boy!” Then she could always reply proudly. “He’s my little brother!”

  But he never wrote to her.

  Then one clear frosty morning when she was doing the Monday’s wash under the elm tree in the yard she looked up and saw him walking down the road to the house, a small suitcase in his hand. She could not believe it was he, but she knew the way he walked. And it was like him to come suddenly, without a word. She straightened herself above suds and ran, clumsy with her child, to meet him and take him in her arms.

  “Oh Frank!” she cried, laughing and wanting to cry. “I’ve been thinking about you so much. Why haven’t you answered my letters? I’ve written and written!”

  Ah, it was good to have her arms warmly about someone!

  He had grown. He was taller than she now, he was handsomer than ever. But so thin! Her eyes took him all in at once—that was the same blue suit he had when he went away. Now it was worn and gray at the wrists and elbows, and he had turned the cuffs of the trousers inward. But it was his face at which she looked. His rosy boyish color was gone. His face was sharp-boned, sunken at the jaws and the temples. He looked tired enough to die.

  “I only got two letters,” he said. “It’s taken me a while to come—to get here.”

  “It’s home,” she said quickly. “Where I am is always home for you.”

  He did not answer. He walked beside her to the house, and followed her in. She took him to the dining room, the only room that was warm, and the day was chilly with autumn. Then she did not know where to take him. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll ask Bart’s mother.”

  In the kitchen she said, “My brother has come.” She paused, “May he—What room shall I put him in?”

  Bart’s mother looked up from the stove, astonished. “How long’ll he be here?” she asked after a while. No one had ever come here to stay.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t had a chance to talk.”

  Bart’s mother lifted the lid of the stove and pushed in a knotty stick of wood. The lid would not fit down and she clattered at it.

  “He can sleep with Sam, or in that old bed in the attic. We used to have a hired man up there when times was good, but nobody’s slept there for a long time. It’s all right as long as it’s not summer. There’s some quilts in that old chest under the eaves.”
r />   She went back to the dining room and took his hand. It was callused and hard, so hard that she looked at it quickly. It was grimed with so deep a grime that it looked as though it could never be clean. “What have you been doing?” she cried. His hands had been slender, the joints supple. It was still a slender hand, it would always be slender, but the skin was scarred and the nails black and broken.

  “Been in machine shops,” he said, “and this last six months I’ve been in West Virginia in a coal mine.”

  “In a mine!” she said, astonished. “I thought you wanted to fly.”

  “I do,” he said. “I lost my job—nobody can hold a job these rotten days—and I went south with my pal. We heard there were jobs in the mines.” He made a grunt of laughter. “Do you see me in a mine, Joan, wanting to fly?” He sat down and put his grimy slender hands through his too long heavy black hair and leaned upon them.

  “Come upstairs,” she said. “Come up to my room. I must know everything.”

  He followed her up the front stairs, not knowing why she hesitated a moment and then said firmly, “Yes, come this way.” She led him into the bedroom.

  “Gee,” he said, “I’d like a bath, Joan. I’ve hiked and hitchhiked for days.”

  She hesitated again. There was the bathroom, but—the child made her strong today for Francis. Someday the child would be a man like Francis, and he would not wash himself in a wooden tub in the woodshed. “I’ll show you where the bathroom is,” she said.

  While he bathed she went downstairs. She was foolish enough to be afraid for a moment of this fat silent woman moving about the kitchen. She listened to know if Francis was quiet. He used to be so noisy, rushing the water out of the faucets, dropping the soap dish, his strong bare footsteps thudding about. But he was very quiet now. For a moment she was so foolish as to think she would not tell Bart’s mother. She could put everything in order—Then she straightened herself. She would not be afraid, she was going to make a life for her own boy here in this house.

  She went to the door of the kitchen. “Francis is using the bathroom,” she said quietly. “He has come a long way—he’s very tired.”

  Looking down, she met Bart’s mother’s eyes fully—pale eyes whose brown had no depth. They were the color of shallow leaf-stained water flowing over stones. She gazed into them steadfastly, defying them. Sometimes it was good to be tall and towering. The pale eyes wavered and fell.

  “There ain’t too much hot water,” she said. “If he uses too much there won’t be enough for the dishes. How long did you say he was staying?”

  “I don’t know,” said Joan.

  She set his place beside hers for the noon meal, and went back upstairs. He was dressed again and sitting in the bedroom. Now that he was clean, he looked very pale.

  “You are much too thin, Frank,” she said, instantly troubled.

  He gave the grin above which his eyes used to sparkle. But now they remained somber. “I haven’t eaten my fill steadily,” he said. “Seems to take a lot to feed me, Joan. I didn’t realize it before when I wasn’t doing it myself.”

  He looked about the room restlessly. “What sort of a place is this you’re in? I haven’t seen your—I haven’t seen Bart yet. I can’t seem to think of you as married.” His eyes swept her figure delicately and moved away.

  She said at once, “You see I’m going to have a baby soon, Frank.”

  “Yes … I hope you’re happy.”

  She did not answer. Now that Frank was here something of her own was near her again. She wanted to talk to him, to confide in him as she had never confided. But he kept his eyes steadily turned from her and his reserve held her away. “I’m happy about the baby,” she said.

  She waited but he did not answer, so she knew they could not speak of herself. She said, “Now tell me about yourself—everything. I’ve thought about you so. Why didn’t you keep that job?”

  “I never could work up in it. They kept me greasing parts and cleaning—all the young fellows who’d been to schools kept coming in and getting ahead. There isn’t any fairness in this rotten system, Joan. I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been away. I used to think if I worked hard and good, I’d get ahead anyway. I soon gave that up, like I gave up all that stuff Dad used to preach. He didn’t know anything real—all that talk.” His face was set in a bitter half-grin.

  “He believed it,” she said quickly.

  “Oh, sure,” he replied. “That’s why it was so poisonous. He was good enough, but that’s no use—not on this earth, not with things the way they are. There’s no chance for a fellow who hasn’t influence or money or something. Remember that letter you got me? That letter didn’t help me. Bair hadn’t any use for Bradley. He hardly looked at it. I got the job because they happened to need a hand just then. It was summer and things were busy.” He examined his hands carefully as if he had never seen them before. “Well, then things weren’t so busy and they dropped me, and there was nothing to do about that. I was hoping to get to be one of the regular ground crew. And about that time you wrote about Father—but I didn’t want to come to Middlehope.”

  “No, it was better that you didn’t.”

  He looked at her sharply and she added, “I mean you couldn’t have helped—it was all over.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I went to Michigan with a fellow and got a job in the factory there. It was furnace work. I couldn’t stand it. I had to stoke the furnaces all day—my skin cracked on me—I was half-roasted. I used to look at my hands and expect the meat to drop off of them. Then I got into some trouble there. I got taken up by some fellows who were arrested for trying to start a strike. Joan, there wasn’t a job in that factory fit for a man to live by except the gatekeeper’s job. He could stand out in the sunshine and air. The rest of us just stood ten hours a day doing one thing, stoking, riveting, hitting the same place in each car as it came along. If you were on that assembly line you couldn’t stop a minute even to breathe or straighten your back—the next car was there and you had to do your share. Another man at the furnaces with me was named Jim Dobie—he was a West Virginia fellow, and his dad had been in the coal mines. He swore he’d never go back. But he did go back and I went with him. He said at least it was cool in the mines—cool and dark. I’d stared into that fire until I thought my eyeballs would burst. I thought if I could just get into some cool dark place … but I couldn’t stand the mine. Every day I had to go down and down—into blackness.” He was twisting his grimed hands and she saw him tremble a little. A light sweat broke out about his lips and he wiped it off and went on twisting his hands. “I’d look up at the sky before I went down. Then I’d have to go down. I had to stand being in a hole in the darkness, the earth and the rocks clamping me in. I never could stand being shut in anywhere, even when I was a kid. One morning—soon after I got your last letter—I looked up like that. It was the brightest morning I’d ever seen, sunshine everywhere and the leaves all glittering yellow—everything was sunshine. And I looked up and there was a plane flying high in all that light. I just laid down my stuff and quit. I guess you won’t understand. But I quit. I said, I’ll never go down again, not if I starve, not if I never fly. At least I won’t go down again.”

  “I do understand,” she said. “I understand better than I can tell you.”

  “I don’t see—’” he began, and the door opened and Bart came in.

  Bart stretched his hand out toward Francis heartily. “I heard downstairs you were here,” he said. Upon his square unshaved face was his aimless good-natured grin. She saw him sharply, in Francis’ astonished eyes. She saw Bart’s rough looks and heard his crude laughter, she saw his simple mind. She saw his thick nostrils and little deep-set meaningless eyes, his huge useless strength, as useless as a beast’s unless it were harnessed to some primitive tool.

  Her eyes met Francis’ eyes with brave pleading.

  “You see I do understand,” she said.

  She had been living here on this hillside, and beyo
nd the rim of the stable hills the world had been roaring and whirling around her, as huge and unknown as the night sky against which she had drawn the shades, lest she be lost. Francis had been caught and held in that whirling, tossed and caught and thrown up again into this one still spot. She listened to him, hour upon hour. He did not pour out talk upon her. He was too wounded for that. In fragments, in torn bits of himself, in scattered words, he let her see. They wandered into the orchard, and into the woods. They sat by the stream in the valley under the falling leaves. In the house he was completely silent, with a guarded stopped silence. But alone with her outdoors he talked, pausing often to breathe deeply, to wipe his forehead when the sweat burst out, to break off suddenly, “Well, there’s no use in going into all that.” There was nothing left in him of that willful boy, tumbling down the stairs in the sunny old manse, crashing into the dining room shouting for food, whistling noisily everywhere, planning loudly for pleasure, arguing eternally for his own way. He moved, guarded and controlled, his head bent downward a little, as though he had been walking for a long time under a roof too low for him. But from the scraps she pieced out what was whirling about this still spot of earth. In the silence of the woods where the stream slipped so softly over smooth stones that it was scarcely to be heard, she listened.

  “Things are shutting down on us everywhere now. You can’t get jobs. They don’t want you. Nobody cares if you starve.”

  He said, “I came near starving right there in New York City—food everywhere, restaurants full of food, shops full of food, groceries, delicatessens, wagons full of food, people sitting eating everywhere. And I was so hungry I went crazy and went up to a taxi stopped at a traffic light. There was a woman inside—an old woman. I wouldn’t have spoken to a girl. I said, ‘Would you let me go with you to any restaurant to get a meal? I’m faint with hunger.’”