Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  “Frank!” she cried. “Why didn’t you come home?”

  “What for?” he answered. “That wouldn’t help. I can’t keep coming home all my life. She wanted to give me money. She said, ‘Here’s a dollar.’”

  “Oh, Frank,” Joan said.

  “I wouldn’t take it. That wasn’t what I wanted. She said, ‘I’ll lend it.’ And I said, ‘I can’t pay it back.’”

  “Then what?” she whispered.

  “Then the light changed and the taxi went on,” he replied.

  A leaf floated slowly down, upheld by the breeze, and settled upon the small placid pool. Its shadow lay, magnified through the clear water, upon a rock at the bottom.

  “And?”

  “I fell in with another fellow who hadn’t any job, and he took me to a joint he knew and the fellow that ran it gave us some stuff left over from what he didn’t sell—lemon pie and stuff that spoiled if he kept it.”

  She was silent, staring at the shadow of the leaf, so clear, so dancing. A squirrel capered up a tree. She could see its inverted reflection in the pool.

  “If you had come home—”

  But he straightened himself impatiently and threw a stone into the smooth pool. It broke into a shimmer of ripples and the leaf tossed like a little ship upon the little waves.

  “Don’t you see it wouldn’t matter? There’s hundreds of fellows like me, trying to catch on somewhere, hungry as hell—running home doesn’t help them. There’s got to be a place for them. Gosh, when I think of that stuff Dad used to talk—all that holy salvation stuff! Listen here—not one thing he said was ever any use to me.”

  “He honestly believed—” she began, troubled.

  “Yeah, and what of it?” He was snarling. She saw a hungry boy wandering along the city streets, his hat over his eyes, his body aching with hunger. “You’ve got to do something more than talk these days. Something’s got to be done, and be done damned quick! There’s a lot of us feeling like that. And I stick by them! I stick by the hungry and the fellows that can’t get jobs!”

  He was shouting, his voice ringing through the quiet woods. He had sprung to his feet and she looked up at him.

  “Why, Frank, you look just like Father!” she said.

  He stared back at her.

  “Oh, my God!” he whispered.

  He dropped to the log beside her and began scuffling at the small stones.

  “I mean—”

  “I know what you mean,” he said bitterly. “It’s the damnedest thing, the way you can’t get rid of your ancestors!”

  He fell into moody silence and she was bewildered. “Come on home to supper, anyway,” she said at last. At least today she had that to give him, food upon a table and a roof under which to sleep. She would take him home. He rose to follow her, and they stood a moment looking at the pool. It was smooth again and the little leaf was quietly sailing on a wave, sailing nowhere and the stone he had flung lay lost among the other stones at the bottom.

  But here was no home for Francis, though with all her strength she sought to make it a home. She took the walls of this house and encompassed him about for his shelter. She made his bed in the attic soft with quilts and put sheets upon it for comfort, although Sam slept without sheets, and not until she came had Bart used them. But Francis should use their mother’s sheets which she had brought with her. She dragged the boxes and trunks to make a sort of room for him near the bookshelves. And at the table she plied him with food, passing him the butter, the bread, the meat, relentlessly under their eyes.

  “I’ll make a pie,” she said to Bart’s mother. She had not cared before, but now she wanted to make it.

  “It takes lard,” the older woman said, grudgingly.

  Then Joan shamelessly made use of Bart. “Bart says he likes pie,” and when she saw Bart’s mother give way she used this means again and again. “I made a raisin pudding, Bart.” “Bart, I made cookies today—Francis, they’re the old ginger cookies, like Mother’s.” Bart ate, enchanted. “Gosh, Jo, you’re a famous cook. What’s the matter you been keeping it all to yourself?”

  She smiled, her eyes on Francis. His thinness was daily growing into a slender resilient strength. When they were alone she urged him, “Eat, Frank. I want you to get your strength back.”

  “Yes, I’ll take food,” he said sturdily. “I’ve got to begin again, I’ll stay until I am able to begin over.”

  He was so beautiful she could not stop looking at him. His hands were free of the black of the mines now, but they were hard, clean and hard. He helped silently about the place, chopping wood and filling the box in the kitchen and in the dining room, helping her wring the clothes and hang them, carrying water to the barn. She would give him something when he went back to work, buy a new suit for him. She would coax him to take it. But now she gave him a pair of the blue jeans that Bart wore. “I’ll take your suit and clean it and press it.” She brushed and pressed the stuff with careful pleasure. It was not work to touch and clean and mend that which clothed one’s beloved. Strange how garments partook of the bodies which they clothed!

  But none of this made his home. In the attic they met sometimes alone, and they knew that their only home was all that which they had shared and which was gone now. They talked long hours here together, he talking again and she still listening. She led him on to talk and now he talked more easily. His speech did not come in such wrenched, broken sentences. He was growing a little healed. But as he was healed he was restless. He was like an animal held by a wound, and one day he would be well of it and ready again to go away. But they talked always and only of him—and she wanted it so. She fended off day by day the question which she saw hanging upon his lips, daily nearer to utterance: “Joan, how did you come to do this?” She talked feverishly of himself. “What do you want to do now, Frank darling? When you get rested and ready to start again—” In the attic she poured out the names their mother used so lavishly upon them all: “darling Frank,” “dear heart,” “dearest Frank”—all the names for which she had as yet no other use—no use until her baby was born. So that she might fend off that question she talked constantly with him about himself, because in such talk he forgot her. “I want to fly,” he said, over and over. “I’ve got to fly—I can do it. If I had a chance I could do it. I feel it in myself—the power to do it. I’d know how to do it if I could just get at the controls. They wouldn’t need to tell me but just the once—”

  He liked the attic. He came to it now whenever there was nothing he could do, when she was busy about the house, when they were not at meals. She found him here when she was free by the gable window, staring out into the sky, over the hills and fields. “I can almost imagine sometimes here that I’m flying,” he said. “That elm tree top just outside hides the ground. You see Joan? You look straight over it to the hills and it seems far up.”

  Yes, she knew Francis must go. They were pushing him out by their silence, by their steady disapproving silence. She said, placating Bart’s father, “Let Francis shell the corn for you today.”

  “I’ve shelled it myself for thirty-five years,” he said grimly.

  “Francis can bring up the milk for you,” she said to Bart’s mother. “Francis and I will gather the eggs.”

  “The hens don’t take to strangers,” she said, and Francis stumbled upon the dark cellar stairs and spilled the milk. “You better go and set somewhere,” she said bitterly, and cried at Joan, hastening with a cloth and a pail, “Don’t bend over—you’ll hurt yourself and I’ll have the care of you.”

  No, here was no home. And he never really gave himself up to her here. For with all their talk, they never spoke of why he had gone away that day, of why she had urged him to go away and why he had eagerly gone. Part of him still hid from her.

  One morning after breakfast, when he had been there less than three weeks, Sam beckoned to her with his great thumb. She followed him into the hall and he shut the door.

  “You kinda follow me after a hal
f hour or so,” he whispered to her. “I’ll be in the barn cleaning out the manure. Got something to tell you.”

  “Why don’t you tell me now, Sam?” she asked, surprised. His full red face was strangely unyouthful, close to hers like this. He had already lost his front side teeth. He was not yet twenty-five.

  “You’ll thank me for not telling you here,” he replied. “It’s about your brother.”

  She stopped, frightened. “All right, Sam,” she said quietly.

  In the kitchen, over the dishes, she searched for excuses. “I believe I’ll stir up some applesauce,” she said to Bart’s mother. “I’ll go out and pick up some corncobs to start the fire up a little.”

  “I told Sam to get them last night,” the mother answered.

  “He forgot,” said Joan. “I’ll tell him.”

  In the barn, above the smoking manure, she heard Sam’s coarse whispering. He leaned upon the spade, his little hot eyes boldly upon her, glancing now and then at her fullness.

  “I heard something last night, Jo. Never mind where I heard it, but I heard it, straight from a colored girl. She’s looking for your brother. Says he owes her something and she’s going to get it. She’s not all colored—she’s pretty near three-fourths white. Name’s Fanny. She heard he’d come back.”

  “How did she hear?” Joan asked. She knew he was staring at her, but she would not seem to know. She could penetrate that shallow skull. He turned away and spaded with elaborate ease about the edge of a stall. “Oh, women like her—they got ways of knowing—they find out anything they want to find out.”

  She did not speak. She stood watching his spade searching out the filth and lifting it. The stench overwhelmed her—rank, penetrating, hot. He stood in it, breathing it in and out. She turned quickly and went outside the barn, panting for the clean air.

  But she was grateful for the warning, else how would she had known so swiftly what to do that next afternoon? It was a still, fair afternoon, and she had just come down from the attic. She had gone to find Francis, but when she lifted the latch he lay on the bed, his hands folded under his head, asleep. He lay very still, breathing so gently she could not hear him. Upon his face was a look of deep repose. She closed the door again, softly. Let him rest. He seemed so seldom to rest. In the close tense stillness in which he now held himself there was no rest. He had in so short a time changed all the loose gamboling ways of his youth to this controlled stillness of the body. It was as though under his clothes his body were bound in secret chains. So let him rest.

  She went out into the sunshine of the afternoon. It was not late, but the sun would soon be gone. She turned westward down the road, to walk a little while, her face toward the sun. In the barn the men were milking. She could hear Bart’s voice roaring at a cow: “Stand over there, Bessy! Careful now, you—”

  She set her face steadily westward.

  It was then that she saw the girl coming toward her. She came up the road, walking with a sort of springy dancing step, and she had a child with her, a little boy. She had been carrying him, but when she saw Joan she set the child down in the dusty road and led him toward her.

  Joan stopped, waiting, looking at the two. Of course this was Fanny. She remembered now she had seen this face, this gay careless passionate pretty face, the last time she had been at the mission with her father. This girl had been there. She remembered her wearing a thin red flowered dress through which her skin had shone, golden. The girl’s face looked up to hers, a face like a dark, petunia, the full red lips, the great dark swimming eyes, black iris, clear white, passionate eyes and mouth, smooth round dark cheeks, strong short curly black hair under a small bright red felt hat.

  “Are you Frank Richards’ sister? You favor him mightily.” The girl’s voice was like honey, thick-deep, sweet.

  “Yes,” Joan said—no use trying to say anything else. “I’m his sister—what do you want of him?”

  “I heard he was here.”

  She looked down into the black eyes. … And why should she now remember Miss Kinney, standing before the missionary meeting, talking about great eyes peering through the jungle, jungle eyes?

  “He’s gone,” she lied. “He’s gone back to his job.”

  “Could you kindly tell me where he is?”

  “Far away—away out west.”

  “Is he coming back soon?”

  “No—not soon—perhaps never. He didn’t say.”

  In the twilight the child suddenly began to cry softly, and the girl slapped him sharply on the cheek. “Shut up, you!” The child turned and buried his face in her skirt, and sobbed noiselessly. He was too thinly dressed and Joan saw he was shivering.

  “He’s cold,” she exclaimed.

  “He wouldn’t be so cold if he’d walked more instead of fretting me to carry him,” the girl said petulantly. But Joan dropped to her knees, not able to bear the child’s noiseless weeping. A little child ought not to know how to weep silently, she thought. He must have been many times afraid before he could have taught himself to weep like that.

  She began to unbutton her jacket.

  “I have a sweater underneath,” she said. “Let me wrap it about him.” She took off the garment and knelt upon the ground and slipped the child’s arm through the sleeves and turned them back over his hands. Without knowing it she was coaxing him, talking to him tenderly, persuading his little chilled body into the wrap. “There now, little boy! Now, this hand, now we’ll button it up warm and tight. See, I’ll put your own belt around to hold it close There … there …”

  The child, won by her voice, looked at her, and she saw his face fully, near to her own. Her heart turned in her breast. Francis had been beautiful, but this child was the most beautiful she had ever seen. This little face was the face of a dream child. She stared into it, trembling, drawn, repelled. Francis, her mother, her father, her own self—all of them were there in this jungle child’s lovely face, but to them all were added the darkness, the passion, the power of the jungle.

  “He’s your own brother’s child.” She heard the girl’s deep wild voice. “He put this child in me. He come and met me in the woods down by the stream and put this child in me and then he went away and left it on me. I got no way to keep him. If a man fathers a child in me, he’s got to take it or pay for it, one or other. Else I can’t make my living. And I’m wanting to settle down. I got a colored fellow will marry me if I can do something about this child. It’s your own brother’s—I can prove it.”

  “Don’t tell me anything!” Joan whispered. “I believe what you say. I don’t want to know. Let me think.”

  She rose to her feet and stood looking at the child. He looked back to her silently, comforted by the jacket, trying to hold his lips against quivering. From under his fabulous lashes he looked up, his eyes unearthly large. He could not possibly understand. He was too small. And yet he seemed to know his circumstances. She loved him suddenly, and she knew she could not let him go—she must keep hold of him—her mother, her father, Francis, all of them were here in this tiny body. His blood was theirs.

  “If you will wait a few days,” she began, breathless, still looking down at him, “not more than a week—say a week from today—I’ll bring you a little money. I have to get it from the bank. I haven’t much, but I’ll surely help you. And I’ll think what to do—if you’ll just go home now. I’ll be here a week from today at this same time with the money. You can trust me, can’t you? My father used to preach in South End.”

  “Yes, I used to hear him.” The girl laughed, a full deep laugh. “Lordy, I used to think what a conniption he’d have if he knew he was a granddad!”

  Joan said, “Our parents are dead.”

  “Yes, I know. The chapel’s shut up. They say it’s going to be a dance hall next summer—fellow name of Jack Weeks is going to open a beer hall there as soon as the main road’s finished—a little peakedy white fellow, but his dad’s putting up the cash. Going to open the factory again, too. The state’s
working on a big new road now right through South End, and everybody says business is going to be good—we’re all going to make money.” The girl spoke eagerly, her mouth a poppy for redness in her glowing face. She was restored to good humor. “I’ve got to be gone, I guess. My fellow’s waiting down the road. He’s got a car. Well, thank you, ma’am, if you will help me. I call this child Frankie, after his pa. I call them after all their pas—the two girls, I twisted their names. Willa, I call one, and the other—Here, you take off the lady’s jacket, Frankie.”

  “No—let him keep it,” said Joan. “And take care of him.” She turned and began to walk away.

  “Oh, sure I will! I’m always good to them—nobody can say I’m not good to them.”

  She looked after them once, quickly. That small creature was trudging along over the rough earth road. She could see her jacket warm around him, glowing through the twilight a spot of scarlet.

  Oh, what had Francis done?

  In the house there was the smell of wood burning in the kitchen stove. The cover had been taken from the table and in the kitchen, the men were washing. She heard Bart say, “Where’s Jo?”

  “Upstairs, I guess,” his mother answered. “I’ve had no help from her tonight, I know.”

  But she tiptoed through the room and went straight upstairs to the attic. Francis was still asleep. No, he was not asleep. He was lying awake, and he had lighted the candle on the box.

  “That you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She came over and sat on his bed. She had no time to waste. In a few minutes Bart would be shouting for her.

  “Francis,” she began and stopped. “Francis—there was a girl here this afternoon—from South End—looking for you. I met her on the road.”

  She felt his body gather and grow tense. “She was here, looking for me?”

  “Yes—but I knew before.”

  “You knew?”

  “Yes.”

  They were both whispering. He sat up. “If you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t—you didn’t tell me.”