Now in November (16 page)

He wouldn't believe me at first, and even resented that I should question their choice, feeling perhaps that it cast a stain on himself and all the board. And then he got angry in a quick blind way, having all of men's instinctive dread and revolt against the strange, his mind jumping to violence and asylums and fear for the children. He treated me as if I too were tainted, and asked why we hadn't told before. “We didn't know,” I said, and tried to explain the way things were. It was nothing to be afraid of, I said; they'd just have to get someone new for the place.

. . . I came back sick through, dreading how Kerrin would act, and thinking of all the days we'd have
to spend with her, piled one on top of the other without relief or change. And the salary gone.

14

THEY let her go. Not only, I found, because of my going to Bailey, but because the children had talked about her and people were getting uneasy and restless. We had to take it and be quiet at Kerrin's rage when she came home confused with anger and humiliation. The days seemed a long series of unfought battles, a walking between poison-thorns, and there was a need for patience that wore the endurance raw. She hated me, could not help but feel that this came because of that morning I'd found her, and asked why I didn't take the place now I'd pried her from it. “I'd make a slow teacher, Kerrin,” I told her. “I haven't the way with them you have.” “Maybe you haven't,” she said, “but the money would be the same—and yours. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?”

There was no use arguing with her any more, and she could not even work long at one thing. What we asked her to do we could have done ourselves with less time and worry. Father took it indifferently well.
He had the grace or fear not to taunt her with it, and gave up his anger at seeing her wander around and stare aimlessly when there was so much still to do and we could not trust her even to haul the water. It was hard to see her around because of feeling pity; she looked like a thing scratched down to bone, moved by a kind of sourceless energy, not of her own strength any more.

Grant was patient with her in those days, more than ever before. He worked, himself, with a kind of dogged steadiness that shuts out thought and feeling, and used to walk the six miles down to his father's farm more often, spending nights there and coming back at four in the morning.

The evenings were pale and drab now, and Merle never sang with him any more. Not that his voice was much good or with any tune, but it had a strong music to it, and mixed up with Merle's voice it seemed sort of beautiful to us. Even Father used to come sit and listen, and want more when they were sung out empty. Now that Grant went away so much he began to get restless and suspicious, and asked him once if he thought to get married soon; but when Grant said no and turned away, he never probed him again, and
took his uneasiness out on other things, complaining of heat and the sores that came out on his neck and hands.

The dryness went on worse than ever now. A quiet and monotonous dying. Fires started up in the brush, and there was dust over everything from the new road begun half a mile south of us. We could see the dust blowing up, and there was a sort of brown fog along the trees mixed with smoke from the woods burned back along the sides. Fires to the east and west of us had charred off acres, run through part of Rathman's land and killed what was left of his corn. Not that it mattered much,—blasted already and mouthed by grasshoppers. And now this to the south of us—a hot river of wind, constant and full of the black leaf-ash sometimes.

“Damn fools!” Father said. Over and muttering to himself, or breaking out to Mother: “Damn fools to fire now!” Only scrub-pasture and timber lay between us and the road, and it was like ploughing rock to make a furrow. The underbrush dry as sand.

“What do they want a new road for?” Merle said. “Wasn't the old one good enough? Couldn't you get
to town on the old one just as well? What do they have to come burning and smoking and raising up dust like a cyclone for? It's enough to turn your stomach all over!”

“It's wider,” Dad said; looked at her hard and suspiciously, and then over at Grant. “Ain't it a lot better, Grant?”

“A better
road
,” Grant said. He grinned and balanced his words between them so that neither could take him for their meaning.

“A farmer wants good roads,” Father said.

“Good roads, maybe,” Merle snapped at him, “but not to drive through a field of char. It's like a desert by day! Ask Grant—he knows, he has to haul. Why don't
you
haul by day if you like it so much?”

“There're worse things to get torn over,” Grant said. “You can't hate everything and come out sane.”

“I can,” Merle answered him. “I can hate people, and heat, and selfishness, and this Goddamn dust, and farmers that starve their dogs and don't know how to feed their children, and lice, and those like you who stand around saying there isn't a use to try! I can hate about everything there is to hate, and not
want to die either!” She looked up at Grant and stuck her big hands on her hips and grinned up at him, mad and good-natured and ready to splinter anything that he had to say. I saw his fingers tighten up in his fists to keep from touching her; then he turned away and went off to wash his face for excuse not to be near, and mumbled out of his towel that it was a good thing maybe she had so much work to do, and then something about setting all earth on end with her energy and go around chipping off mountain peaks for gravel.

She wouldn't let him get by with passing it over, as though he thought there were no use arguing with a child, and told him only a noisy hate—hate that got itself born in action—counted. “A man can be angry and rage inside,” she told him, “but unless it comes up to the surface he might as well love what he hates!”

“—Or hate what he loves,” Grant said. And I saw Kerrin watching them both.

Merle turned away at that and went out, and Grant did not follow her. . . . The air was a queer red fog from the sun and smoke, and she seemed the only clear and definite thing in all of the dusty smear and mist.

15

I DO not know how we should have gone on or how things would have been otherwise, but that night was end and beginning to more than I had thought possible to endure.

Kerrin saw the fire down in the south field. She had been out late, wandering around near the barns, and saw it blurring the line of scrub-oaks, and smelled it on the wind. She came back calling us out of sleep, half-wild with excitement. “It's come!” she shouted. Pounded against Grant's door, and shook Merle, lying heavy and sunk hours-under in sleep. Father stumbled out of his bed, and I woke up, not understanding, but saw her shrieking there in the moonlight, and even the red of her hair was plain—the night was so startlingly clear. “Get up, you poor fools!” she shouted, and seemed almost wildly happy in a malicious way. Grant came out, still strapping his clothes around him; he was grim and tired-looking, and his hair ragged. We could see the red light now, a wide wash of it along the field-edge, and the acrid smoke hot along the air. Grant was out first, running
toward the barns, and then Father, stumbling and swearing, his face an awful muddle of fear and rage.

“You'll never be able to stop it now!” Kerrin shouted; then suddenly—and strangely, for her—she snatched at Mother and tried to hold her back. “Don't go!” she begged her.

“We have to,” Mother said. “It's coming fast.” She dragged down a pile of sacks, and Kerrin helped her. We soaked them wet in the last of the barrels, and it hurt to see water splash out along the floor.

The heat was terrible. We fought it along the edge where the bushes were low, but the smoke stung like wasps and poured out over us blind in clouds, and our skins got raw with the heat. I looked over at Merle once, flailing away with her sack, and the steam from it whirled around her as though she herself were a torch. The heat could have been borne, terrific and searing as it was, but the smoke didn't give us a chance to even endure it. Torture too crafty to fight. Kerrin ran back, covering her eyes, and screamed; and I remember now how awful her thin, frantic stumbling looked in the moonlight, but could hardly see for the tears stung out of my eyes; and beat blindly at the grass, feeling the hot ground underfoot, and heard
all around the steady roar from the woods' edge where it was rushing over the dry oak leaves, and the dead underbrush was a mass of flames. “Don't let it reach the cornfield!” Dad kept shouting. He and Grant shoveled helplessly, trying to scrape out a path that the flames couldn't leap, and saw it sweep out beyond them, farther down, closing in on us with a great arc. There was no time for any thought, no time for fear. It was horrible, and too near for us even to realize what it meant.

Then suddenly—I don't know how, unless she stumbled and lurched sideways into the burning weeds—Mother fell and was lashed around with flames before she could drag herself up or scream. Grant saw her fall and ran half a field, throwing his shovel and shouting at us through the roar and smoke-haze, and when we reached them he had dragged her out beyond the fire, smothering the flames with his hands and the sack she'd held,—but too late to keep her from being burned.

Grant and Kerrin carried her back, but Dad stayed on in the field, lashing and digging like a giant, and Merle with him. I went back to the house, knowing that Kerrin would only cry and pray and not be able
to find or know where anything was, nor did I know myself very well for the moment what I should do or find to help her. I sent Kerrin down to Rathman's and did what I could with the things we had, but nothing seemed enough to cover all the terrible burns, and there was no more salve on the shelf than a little to spread on her face and hands.

The air was full of smoke and like a fog in the lamplight. It was hard to breathe now, and Mother cried out sometimes.

“You go back,” I told Grant. There wasn't anything he could do,—no way for anyone to get between her and the suffering, and there was the fire coming on nearer all the time. Scrub-oaks and brush bursting suddenly into torches all up and down the field, the fence posts flaring up, and roar of sound when the branches crashed to earth. Grant went out, and I stayed alone, not able to do anything, only praying and crying out to something or against everything—Christ please!

It was awful—horrible—to see her suffering. I think I would rather be racked than go through that night again.—The red light reflected hot on the windowpanes,
the choking air, and Mother lying there on the bed, blotched red and half-crazy with pain. . . . Then Kerrin came back bringing some salve, and said they had called a doctor, and stood there crying and beat her hands together—even went down on her knees by the bed and kept saying—O God please take it away!—take it away! Mrs. Rathman looked at her, not understanding, and scared at her fierceness, and all the time the smoke was getting stronger and more acrid in the room till Mother started gasping for breath. Then Max came and Kerrin got up and went out with him to finish fighting a trench around the cornfield. The whole woods were almost gone now, and the haystack nearest the fence, and there was the hiss and lick of fire through the wheat stubble, creeping fast in a tongue across the northwest corner.

“You go too,” Mrs. Rathman said. She spread out her slimy brown salve over Mother's neck, and seemed solid and comforting, full of assurance now that Kerrin was gone. I went out again and ran toward the field, saw them moving against the fire like furious black ants, Merle flailing and beating still, and the men digging wild as animals. Dad had no breath to
speak when I got there, but looked up at me, his face angry and twisted with the pain, and then went on shoveling at the grass.

“Mrs. Rathman's here,” I said, “and the doctor's coming.” It was easier to stand the heat and smother of smoke than to see her suffer, and I beat at the shallow grass till it was torture to draw in breath.

When they came to the scraped-out path the flames stopped, licked and flickered and went out, but leaped beyond it in places and caught at the moulting thistles, rushing forward again and spreading out. It was like a terrible nightmare of earth's end. . . . Then suddenly the wind died down, the flames came slower, and smoke drifted up instead of coming in blind clouds. We saw the moon paler, and there was a greyish light. It was the hour before dawn when the wind had always stopped in those nights; and a faint chill was come at last in the air. In the gradual ceasing of sound we heard the cocks crow with a fresh eerie shrillness, startling as from another world.

We beat out the last flames and Merle covered a smouldering post with earth. The wires lay down across the field with the charred posts left at intervals like burned crows caught between the barbs.

16

IT WAS over, but there were still the black, ruined woods, the stakeless fence, and the great haystack gone. We looked at each other in the grey, sourceless light, and could not laugh,—though, God knows, when I think of it now I remember most clearly Max's swollen face spotted with purple from the heat, and his eyebrows singed, and Merle's legs black as the burned fields were, her hair singed too and hanging down like a mane around her big face. Father turned and shouted at us not to forget the shovels, and started limping off toward the house. Max came along, grumbling and swearing in a loud mutter, and rubbing his itching eyes until they were raw. We had no feeling of triumph or success; only of tiredness and the awful, unnecessary waste. It had cost too much to win.