Time Is Noon

by Pearl S. Buck

  “You can’t ever put him away anywhere,” said Mrs. Mark. “That’s what folks don’t understand. Putting his body away wouldn’t help. You can’t put your child away from your heart. Besides, you don’t want to miss everything of him just because you haven’t all of him. He’s got his own ways. He’s Paul. Don’t measure him by other people. Just take him as he is. If he talks, those few words he’ll say will mean more to you than anybody’s.”

  She listened, drinking in the short words. Nobody had ever talked with her about Paul. It was a comfort to talk about him at last. A mother wanted to talk about her child. She had always shrunk from talking before the few she knew. She heard women in a store talking: “Johnnie’s walking now—pulling himself up by anything.” “My Mary Ellen starts school in the fall—” “Polly’s first in her grade this month—” And by such words she was tortured. She held herself away from all mothers of children. Now through the morning she sat holding Paul, talking to Mrs. Mark about him, playing with his fingers, with his golden curls, weeping sometimes.

  “Go on and cry,” said Mrs. Mark calmly. “I used to cry. You pass the need, after a while. You can’t keep it up.”

  She pointed out to Mrs. Mark the lovely perfection of his body, the shape of his head, the set on his shoulders, the sweetness of his flickering smile.

  “I suppose it all makes no difference really,” she said sadly.

  “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Mark. “It makes a difference to you, doesn’t it? He’s a handsome child, and be thankful he is. You get more fun out of tending him anyway than if he was homely. In the smallest drawer under my bed there’s a little black money box, locked. Here’s the key.” She dragged up a string from her bosom. “I want you to buy a bed. You could have this one almost any day—I’ll be done with it and soon. Still, I don’t want to feel people are waiting for the bed I die in.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Joan. “I don’t want you to give me anything.”

  “I’m not giving you anything,” said Mrs. Mark irritably. “I’m making it so you can stay and take care of me while I finish dying. Don’t be an interruption. I didn’t pray God to have you come. I wouldn’t demean myself to pray after what’s happened to me. The politest thing I can do about God now is to say there isn’t any under the circumstances. But I’m mortal glad not to die alone.”

  “There’s Rose’s children to come,” said Joan.

  “Pack them in if that Winters woman won’t have them,” said Mrs. Mark, closing her eyes, “There’s a room finished off in the garret. I was going to fix my girl a room there and Mr. Mark died that winter and she stayed with me. That Winters woman—well, she’s a Christian, isn’t she? Get along, Joan, I’m tired.” She opened her eyes as Joan tiptoed away. “If that Bart Pounder comes around don’t pay any attention to him. Fire and clay don’t mix, and all the stirring in the world won’t mix them. Get along now, for mercy’s sake! I’m worn out.”

  In Bart’s house where she had never belonged, everything had been a burden. To be free had seemed impossible, to write to Roger Bair would have been a task beyond her power to do. She lived submerged and overcome. Now by the simple processes of this small house wherein she was free, by the approval of this one old dying woman, by the desperate simplicity of crude sorrow, she thought easily, Why should I not write to Roger Bair? While Mrs. Mark slept and when she had made the house neat, she took Paul out into a sunny corner behind the house and set him in a nest of dried leaves and stretched herself beside him and planned the letter. It need only be very short. She could speak directly to him if ever they came to speech. She could write directly. She would begin, “Dear Roger Bair. …”

  She lay in the warm sun, dreaming. It was so easy to think of him here. When she had thought of him in that house it was a hopeless thought. So might a mole think of a bird, so might a bird think of a star. When she remembered him, the thought of him fell back, like an arrow blunted and stopped too soon of its aim. But today, in the free loneliness, in this joyful loneliness, she saw him very clearly. Of course he was the one who could help her. She felt him instant and warm to help her. They had known each other that day without waiting. She would write and he would answer.

  The day was full of the certainty. She lay with her face turned to the sun, her eyes closed that she might see inward the more clearly and remember him. Soon she would get up and write the letter. She put off the writing, planning. It would be sweet to take the pen and make the words, “Dear Roger Bair.” Then she would write, “You have helped Francis so much, and now I need help too. I remember you.” Or she might write … She paused, dreaming, and without knowing it, was swept on into warm dreaming sleep.

  When she woke it was cold with sundown. A wind had risen out of the nearby wood. Paul was fretting among the leaves, struggling to get up. He certainly tried to get up alone now sometimes. She jumped to her feet and brushed the leaves from her skirt and out of her hair and picked him up and ran into the house with him.

  “How I slept!” she called to Mrs. Mark in the other room while she tended him. But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She went to the door and cried merrily, “Still sleeping?” But Mrs. Mark did not answer. She found the matches and lit the candle quickly. The room felt strangely empty. When the candle was lit she saw Mrs. Mark lying in the dusk, her hands neatly folded upon her breast. She was dead.

  She laid Paul safely in quilts upon the floor and locking the door upon the two of them, ran through the deepening twilight to find Dr. Crabbe. He was eating his supper of bread and milk and he leaped up when he saw her. But when she cried out her message he sat down again.

  “I’ll finish my supper,” he said. “I learned a long time ago not to run if the patient was already dead. Run for the dying—but if it’s too late, finish your supper—that’s sense for the doctor.” He dipped up the last mouthful. “Poor soul,” he said heartily, “I’ve been expecting her to go off suddenly like this any time for months. I’ve been trying to get her to have somebody in, but she always said she hadn’t had much of her own way in life, and she was going to die as she liked. How come you were there, Joan?”

  Joan hesitated. Dr. Crabbe had taken her when she was born. She had begun her life naked in his hands. “I’ve left my husband,” she said.

  “You have!” said Dr. Crabbe. “You and your upbringing!” He put down his spoon and bellowed, “Nellie!” The housekeeper put her head in the door. “I’m going! Mrs. Mark has died at last.”

  “You’ve got rice pudding yet to eat,” cried Nellie belligerently.

  “I won’t eat it,” he shouted, struggling into a threadbare brown coat. She disappeared, muttering. “Come on,” he said to Joan. He tramped ahead of her to his small rackety old car and started the engine with a roar. “Left Bart Pounder, eh?” he shouted. She nodded. The engine calmed and the car jumped down the road like a jackrabbit. “I never told you,” he said, “I was married once.”

  “No!” she whispered, unbelieving.

  “She ran away from me,” he said abruptly, “ran away with a fellow—friend of mine—a fellow I knew in college. He came to visit us—decent chap, too. We’d talked some of being partners. I couldn’t blame her. Smooth-skinned fellow—I’ve always been kind of hairy.”

  “She didn’t run away for that,” said Joan.

  “How do I know what for? She ran away when we’d been married less than a year. Some women run and some stick it out, I reckon. Your mother stuck it.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Joan quickly.

  “No. Well,” said Dr. Crabbe, “some women do. It doesn’t matter in the end. Lucille—that was her name—she’s been happy. Every now and then she writes me, wants me to get married again. I say who to, for God’s sake? There isn’t anybody else. Get out that side, Joan. Not that I can do anything, if she’s dead.”

  But he went in and washed Mrs. Mark’s dead body carefully while Joan waited outside. He called Joan at last. There was a slip of paper in his hand. “She had this under the pillow—wrote it today,
I reckon.”

  There were four lines scrawled upon the paper.

  Joan Richards, married Pounder, is to have my house and everything in it. In the money box is one hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I write this in full and right mind.

  ABBY MARK

  “Has she anybody?” asked Joan in a whisper. Mrs. Mark lay stiff and still on the bed.

  “Never heard of it,” said Dr. Crabbe, washing his hands.

  “It’s not legal,” she argued.

  “No, but if anybody shows up and says it isn’t, tell him to come and see me, and I’ll sic Martin Bradley on him. Martin’s beholden to me. I’ve kept him out of trouble for years, and there’s never been anything to have him do back for me.” He dried his hands, and glanced at Mrs. Mark. “Are you scared to stay here till tomorrow with her?” he asked.

  Joan looked at Mrs. Mark, neat and composed. “I can’t imagine being afraid of her,” she said.

  “No,” said Dr. Crabbe. “She’s been as good as dead for years. Well, I’ll go back and eat my rice pudding.” He seized his dilapidated leather bag and trudged away.

  So she had had no time to write the letter to Roger Bair. But in the night she woke, and the thought of it was sweet. It lay ahead of her, like a treat to a child, a pleasure to be fulfilled. Even if he never answered her, she would have written the letter and signed her name, Joan Richards. He need not know her life. She would simply be herself to him, Joan Richards. Behind the closed door Mrs. Mark lay dead, but she was not afraid. She would like to have gone in and thanked Mrs. Mark if she could. “Thank you for giving me a house, a home. You’ve made me safe.” It seemed impossible to bear it if there was no way to thank Mrs. Mark in the power of her gratitude. But Mrs. Mark would have been the last person to endure thanks. She could imagine Mrs. Mark opening her small dead eyes to say, “Get along—don’t bother me. Don’t you see I’m dead?” and instantly closing them again. It was like Mrs. Mark to give her all she had and then die before she could be thanked. She drifted into sleep.

  In the morning when Mr. Blum came with his two men she had everything ready. She had picked a bouquet of pale purple wild asters and goldenrod, and placed them by the bed, and she had opened the windows to sun and wind. There was no odor in the room. When she had opened the door she had half expected the remembered smell of death. But Mrs. Mark had not died suddenly in health and fullness. Her body was spare and dry, bone clean, withered without decay. She lay exactly as she was. Mr. Blum put on his gloves and his men set a long box beside the bed.

  “Dr. Crabbe’s given full directions,” he said unctuously. “You are the sole mourner, ma’am, I understand?”

  “She had no one,” said Joan.

  “Very nice, I’m sure,” said Mr. Blum. “I remember your mother so well—beautiful in death, I said of her. I don’t remember the name of the gentleman you married, Miss Richards.”

  She did not answer, and he forgot her. “Easy there, now, men, feet first—There she is, comfortable as a baby!”

  He fitted the lid down exactly and took Mrs. Mark away.

  It was impossible to feel sad. She was ashamed that she could not feel sad. She was not sad even when she stood in the corner of the churchyard beside the grave. About the narrow hole stood a few old people—Mr. Pegler, Mr. and Mrs. Billings, Miss Kinney, Dr. Crabbe and Mrs. Parsons. They stood listening to the new minister’s quick abstracted voice. He had not known Mrs. Mark except as a rude old woman who pretended to be asleep when he went to see her, and now he made haste to bury her.

  They stood about him in the bright afternoon, old and wrinkled and shabby. Only Dr. Crabbe looked sturdy, stocky and rough like a thick-trunked tree whose top had been early chopped away and the wound long healed. His curly white hair blew in the breeze as he held his hat in his hands. Miss Kinney stood a little away from them all, a wraith. She talked to herself, her lips moving, smiling. Catching Joan’s eyes she waved her hand gaily across the grave and then remembered where she was and blushed an ashen pink. Her face was more than ever like a small withered flower at the end of a long stalk.

  It was over very quickly. Mrs. Parsons sang, her voice rising feeble and shallow in the autumn air. “For all the saints who from their labors rest,” she sang. Joan listened, gazing across the grass to where her mother and father lay. Mrs. Mark would have hated such singing. “Don’t call me a saint, for pity’s sake,” she would have snorted if she could.

  Yes, it was soon over. The minister shook hands with them briskly and went away. The old people lingered. They spoke to her. “Well, Joan, we don’t see much of you these days,” and lingering they spoke together a moment. None of them had known Mrs. Mark very well. “She wasn’t a woman you could know,” said Mrs. Parsons gently, “but I am sure she was very good.”

  Mr. Pegler pondered. “I didn’t make her a pair of shoes—let me see—not for twelve years, and then they were house shoes—slippers. She came to me that day, I remember, saying she was stiff in the legs. Well, we all have to go, one way or another, and soon it’s all over with us. We’ve had all there is. There’s nothing beyond.”

  They fell silent, these old people, looking at a new grave, troubled, frightened. No one contradicted Mr. Pegler, for once. Any day now, any one of them—Miss Kinney was staring down at the coffin, bewildered, as though she had not seen it before. The sexton was beginning to shovel in the earth.

  “Why, we are all getting old, aren’t we?” Miss Kinney cried. She looked down upon them, one and another, her small face frightened.

  “Come along now,” said Dr. Crabbe, taking her fragile arm in his hand. “I’ll take you home. Your mother will be wanting you.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Miss Kinney. “I must go, of course. I can’t leave Mother too long.” She bobbed away beside Dr. Crabbe, a head taller than he, a wisp dropping over his thick rolling body.

  Mr. and Mrs. Billings were waiting. They stood together, a little to one side, waiting for her. These two were not afraid. “Everything’s got to die,” Mr. Billings was saying respectfully. He said this often in his butcher shop. He had not sold Mrs. Mark any meat in years. But she was part of the village, so he had come to her funeral.

  “Joan, honey,” said Mrs. Billings. “How are you getting on?”

  Now everyone was gone except the three of them. And she wanted to tell this plain old pair everything. They stood so honest in the sunshine, their big comfortable bodies, their red honest faces. “I’ve left my husband,” she said. They stared at her. “I just couldn’t go on,” she said quickly.

  Mr. Billings nodded. “I know the Pounders,” he said very slowly. “They’re honest folks—though queer. They keep to themselves. I buy a steer or two from them now and then.”

  Mrs. Billings patted her hand, sighing hoarsely, “Well, dear—”

  “I’m living in Mrs. Mark’s cottage,” Joan said, hurrying on. “She left it to me. I’m to have Rose’s children.”

  “That little pretty Rose,” mourned Mrs. Billings. “It’s hard to understand all that’s took place—so much scattering and sorrow these last ten years. Yet it seems only yesterday that your mother went.”

  “Yes,” said Joan. They stood in silence a moment. She felt them warmly near her, without condemnation, taking her as she was.

  “Well,” said Mr. Billings, clearing his throat, “with all them children you’ll be like the old woman in the shoe. I better send you some meat to make ’em some broth.”

  He grinned at her cheerfully and she smiled and tears rushed to her eyes. “You’re two of the best people in the world,” she said.

  Mr. Billings laughed. “We’re most common,” he said.

  The sexton was shaping the grave carefully, patting down the sod. It was all over and they went away.

  But still it was not possible to be sad. Waking next morning, in the little house, it was as though now for the first time she was really beginning to live. Mrs. Mark had given her a place where she could live and had gone quietly away, leav
ing nothing of herself.

  She set the three rooms straight and neat, and put Mrs. Mark’s clothes together. There was very little. Mrs. Mark had lived here without small possessions. She was not willing to be cluttered by many things. In the closet hung two black dresses. They were limp and the folds were faded from long hanging. She had not worn them in years. All the things scarcely filled a bushel basket. Joan packed them neatly and took them into the attic and found a corner under the eaves.

  She had not been in the attic before. There was a room finished off in unpainted boards, a room never lived in, clean except for dust. That was David’s room, she decided quickly. This house was now her own! Every room was hers to do with as she liked. There was no feeling of strangeness anywhere in it. It had been given to her and she had taken it. The other house to which she so foolishly had fled for shelter could never have been hers. It was shaped from the beginning by alien life. Though they had all died and left it to her, it would not have been hers and she could not have loved it. But this house sheltered her at once, warmly, closely. She felt as though she had already lived here a long time. She loved the deep walls, the many small windows, the hues of brown and golden stone. There was an old fireplace. Someone had taken the stones of the field, from his own land, and built this house and made a fireplace to warm him and his love. Surely, surely sometime this house had been made in love and lovers had planned it and Mrs. Mark had only kept it for her. And she would live here with all her children, gathering them together beneath this roof.

  And warm in all she did, like a southern current through the sea, ran the thought of the letter to Roger Bair. It would be like bringing him, too, under this roof. She put off writing hour by hour—her heart needed its dream. She set the house neat and made the bed fresh, the mattress fresh with sun and wind, and she gathered flowers from the meadows, goldenrod and small starry purple asters and a bunch of scarlet leaves, and when the house was made wholly her own she sat down in the evening of a day of sweet loneliness, when she had seen no other face than Paul’s, to write the letter at last. So how could she be sad?