Now in November (9 page)

That he should have this hard, almost cynical attitude toward things and yet at the same time so much kindness, made me feel a gratitude nearly pain. I remember the thankfulness I'd have whenever Dad got his history mixed and tried to prove points before us at the table, and Grant would let it go by, knowing the answer but not wanting to make him seem ridiculous and lay him open to Kerrin's spite.

Grant had liked Kerrin then. It was not hard to understand, and perhaps I might have, too, had I been he. Might even have loved those things that I hated in her—her fierce unexpectedness and shifting, even her selfishness. . . . She didn't come in for supper at all any more; and I'd thought it strange at first, since Grant ate here every night, but began after a while to understand—if Kerrin is ever to be understood. It was a part of her difference from us, and partly a desire not to take or to meet him in the same way that we were doing—as one of us. She realized, too,
in a sort of distorted way, his clear seeing of things and that he would not always excuse the restless and clever cruelty in her that attracted him sometimes. . . . I wanted to forget her, wanted to pretend a little longer that tomorrow—some time—she would be different. Or gone. It seemed at times that this feeling of waiting, of life suspended and held in a narrow circle, would go with her. I knew that this wasn't so, that nothing would really begin that had not its roots in ourselves, but could not help feeling she was the thing that caused this smothering. There was something in her—or lacking—that kept her from seeing outside the warped and enormous “I.” It came to me that she would do anything she chose, because she saw wrongly and did not need any excuse but desire. . . . What is sanity, after all, except the
control
of madness? But it must be something more, too, a positive thing,—inclusion of love and detachment from self. . . . I had to fight up thought by thought to things known and recognized all my life, and yet until this year never realized.

But until May the first fog of happiness covered up much of this, and stood between me and the real seeing.

16

MAY was a queer month. The beginning of understanding. A cold dry month. Rot-sweet smell of mandrakes on the air, but most things almost too chilled to bloom. No rain, and dust coming up behind the plough. Cold dust is a sort of ominous thing, and Father began to worry over the shrunken pond. These things were sourly appropriate to the month's end, and yet it began with a quiet ecstasy and happiness.

I went over to the Rathmans' on the first of the month for seed. Max had a new car by then, out of his wages from the road, but not paid for as yet. He got to town more often than Father did, and brought us back stuff from Union, but said our land was too rutted to drive his car along and so left what he bought down at his house,—a thing which was like Max to do, and we took it for granted now. I was glad to have reason for going there, though. They seemed so solid and safe, and needed so little. Old Rathman had a good market for his grapes, and made wine with what was left over. He knew where to sell, and trucked his stuff to the doors. Their land was their own entirely and had no debt. Whatever grew on it belonged to
them and went to pay back no unseen owner and the garden shoved up to the edge of the door, kohlrabis undermining the steps almost. Everything old and rich like the earth.

Theirs was more sheltered land than ours, flat and set in the footsteps of a hill. Old Rathman had not been off the place for ten years, but Karl had gone off to Bailey and married there, and Max got his job on the road. Only Aaron was left of the three to help him. I think the old man had been glad to show them he managed as well alone. He never rested, and looked like a warped old gnome with his hat on top.

This day he was not so sure of himself, but still not fearful. “Two acres of strawberries shrivel up like leafs do,” he said. “Hard . . . dry. . . . No rain! Is one to water by hand?
Nein! Let
them shrink up!—the Gottdamn little measles!” He grinned then and picked me some from the crate-toppings. All his berries were big on top, and the wizened ones underneath. “Give her a crate, old lady,” he told Mrs. Rathman, and pointed his hand at the flabby spinach leaves. “We can't eat all of dem tinks.” I tried to tell him we had an acre of
dem tinks
wilting over at home, but he wouldn't listen.

Old Mrs. Rathman was hungry to talk, herself, and told me about the sweet potatoes that Max had raised special for just himself last fall but didn't recognize when she got them cooked. She told me about this Lena Hone who was Max's girl . . . “nice as cream in her way of talking . . . black eyes and hair . . . not much to look at though . . . reminds me of you in a way. . . .” She hoped Max would marry soon and stay to home. That Mary of Karl's hadn't no children yet. Maybe Max would have better luck with Lena. Would I stay longer? No? Well, a jar of apple-butter then . . .

She must have been beautiful once; her hair white now but her polished eyes unchanged and a kind of grave humor wrinkling her cheeks. I wondered what it was like to live safe. Out of debt. I could not believe that they had their own rawness, too, something gone bad under all this white-looking comfort. And there
was
nothing then.

Old Rathman stopped me before I left and asked about Grant. “Vot does Pop tink about his new fellow? Better than Max was, maybe?”

I told him that Grant was pretty good, and then he wanted to know if I knew about Ramsey's loan. Did
I know that “this colored man Ramsey” (Rathman always spoke of him in this way, not with hate or suspicion, but as of a creature from some other earth, as one might speak of a Bushman or giraffe)—did I know that this fellow was almost drove off his place last year? I said no, and he told me that Ramsey had come to him and asked for money to pay his rent. “‘But I ain't got any money,' I told him. ‘I got land and vegetables, but no money!'—Maybe I should have give him kohlrappys to pay his rent! The old lady give him a jar of pickles but no money.”

Then I made out from his rambling words that Ramsey had gone to Koven's and gotten the money there. Rathman knew because he had asked old Koven himself. At first Grant had told Ramsey not to pay—too big a rent anyway. “Let'm try to shove you off and see what'll happen,” he'd said. Christian was scared, though, and not willing to risk it. “Maybe you could get by all right,” he told Grant,—“you ain't a nigger. You don't have a wife and seven children. A nigger can't wait and see what'll happen. He
knows!
”

Grant had loaned him the money then, and would have given it sooner but he hated to pay off Turner who didn't need it and who'd dangled the debt over
Christian's head until he was raw as a Negro could get. To pay off Turner had seemed to Grant like throwing his money down in a sink or propping a wormed old shed with good new poles, but better at least than having the roof crash down on Ramsey's head. You couldn't stand by and do nothing just because you thought it was wrong for a man to be trapped that way.

“Gran' won't be loaning no more, I guess,” Rathman said. “Koven's two years behind in his taxes now.”

Here were all of us then, I thought, crawling along the ruts and shoving our debts ahead like the ball of dung-beetles. Worse off than the beetles themselves who can bury their load and be done.—All of us but the Rathmans, anyway. They're safe, I thought, padded in from fear. They have only to work for the now, and not pay for the years behind. . . .

I came back through their orchard where the early apple trees were in bloom, thick as a snowstorm with white flowers, and the branches long-curved and reaching to the ground. Dear God, but they were beautiful! I stood a few minutes under one that was like the inside of a great white bowl. Chickadees
pecked at the scaly bark for aphis and kept up a crying clack. I felt light and foolishly happy,—the Ramseys, the mortgage and Kerrin forgotten and only shadows. And I knew it was partly the hot flower-smell, but more because we had talked of Grant and I'd heard his name.

17

BY THE middle of May nearly all of last year's cans were gone. Nine jars spoiled. Mother spoke as if this were her own fault for some reason, not blaming the cheap jar-rings that Father bought. He had to, I guess, since there were new dairy sterilizers to buy, and tried to cut down on the things that we used for ourselves. The jars had a rancid and stomach-filling smell that stayed on the hands for hours after we threw the stuff away. The cows gave less milk, and six gallons were lost because of the onions. Milk was scarcer everywhere, but we didn't get much more at the dairy than before. Last year there had been too much, and all farmers had it; Father got less for the gallon on account of Rathman's sending his cans in, too. This year nobody had very much, but the price didn't seem
to change—not at the
back
door of the dairy anyway. There was a wry perfection about the way things worked.

I wished to God it would rain. I could walk in the stream beds by the quarry, and only the ghostly plantain grew stubbornly in the fields. The ground was cracked wide open and Dad was beginning to get more desperate, seeing the pastures start to yellow already. . . . These things are not hard to tell of now. We were used to them and we still had hope. But the things we felt most are hardest to put in words. Hate is always easier to speak of than love. How shall I make love go through the sieve of words and come out something besides a pulp?

Grant was kind, very kind to me. I could not have asked for anything worse. Something snatched and blundered inside me when I heard his voice unexpectedly, but after a while the foolish ecstasy and fog dried up, and there was only the pain and the reality left. I came to see more clearly after one night when Grant and I had gone up to the north pasture together, hunting his watch that he'd lost near the plough. The stars were windy and brilliant, and one enormous planet burned down along the west. It was dark with no
moon, but the white patches of everlasting gleamed out disk-like in the grass. “You hunt near the plough,” he said, “and I'll thrash in the weeds where it might have jumped.” Then I found it half-buried down near the plough nose and deep in a dusty furrow. The watch was an old big silver thing, and one that he'd owned for years. Grant never could tell the time by sun nor tell it by being hungry. “I'd be coming back in for supper while Merle was wiping up breakfast still,” he said. “
Don't trust anything natural, Marget.—Only the little wheels.” He looked at its round dull gleam in the starlight, and wiped off the dust from its face.

There was a fierce sweet smell from the crab-trees, and I peered up at the stars through their twisted branches. Everything drops away, comes to be unimportant in the dark. It's like sleep almost. A freedom from self, from ugliness,—escape even from thought of Kerrin and debt and tomorrow. Dark's like the presence of a father confessor.—Now lay down all the scrabble of your lives . . . confess all the phantoms . . . unburden yourself in dark of the day's accretions. . . . But when I said to Grant that night was the one sure healing which nothing could steal from
a person, he shook his head. “No healing for me, Marget. Night is a sort of blindness. A thing to be gotten over with. I like noon. Short shadows. Like to see what I'm doing.” “—Sun'll not always show you that,” I wanted to say. But didn't. Grant had no flat drab face to hide. Nothing that wouldn't bear noon sun on it. What was it to him that Kerrin got more irrational all the time? What was our mortgage to him? . . . This sense of impermanence and waiting? . . . Love's unintentional hate?—
He
could go when he wanted to.
He
didn't feel any need for safety and solid earth. Nor did the awful waste in life bother him. There was this layer of hardness in him that accepted things without breaking. . . . I was quiet, thinking these things, and we came back soon. There was no reason to have stayed, but it seemed almost a sin to sleep those nights, blind and dead to the stars. We were so tired, though, that they didn't matter. Father and Grant used to sleep like clods of iron, and Merle wouldn't have waked if God Himself had waited outside in the night. But Kerrin went out after dark more than she ever used to.

She was gone still when we came back in, but Father thought it was she in the door with Grant, and turned
toward us, trying to see in the smoky light. “Where've you been, you two?” he shouted. The lamp shook in his hand, casting out shadows like black fire, and made his glasses gleam out. Grant understood Father pretty well and knew how to calm him down, or at least not make things worse. He told him we'd been out hunting his watch. “Marget found it down in a rut,” he said. “I think she can see in the dark.” Then Father saw it was I and not Kerrin, and made a sort of relieved, embarrassed grunt. “That you, Marget?” he asked. “You'd better come up to bed soon.” He went upstairs then and left us standing together in the dark. It was I and not Kerrin, and so there was nothing to fear or shout over.

I saw quite plainly what he had meant; nor did it hurt less to know that this was true.

18

. . . I BEGAN to see clearly what I had already known, and yet had not gone far enough in thought to face. I think I first knew it plainly not through any word spoken, but from watching Grant's face at times when it wasn't guarded. Grant wasn't a simple man
like Father. Not one with his love and hate near his eyes or mouth. I liked it in him and yet was confused, not being used to people who, like myself, kept their feeling so much hidden.

What Merle felt then, I do not know. We never talked direct or openly of him except in an ordinary way. She spoke sometimes in a brief, almost pitying scorn of the way Kerrin was, and laughed at her sometimes without malice and as only a person neither hating nor loving could. . . . We'd see them standing together over the snake-fern Grant had dug up for Mother, which Kerrin would go out and water every day at the time when he came up with the milk; and Merle would look at me and smile. We'd hear her shrill black laugh, and see Grant smiling down at her hot excited face. I was glad when the fern died and we didn't have to see Kerrin going through with her farce of caring about it every night. It's hard to watch people acting fools. (Harder still to watch her dumping out quarts of water on the fern.) Grant tried in sort of pathetic ways to please, and had dug it up out of the ravine woods. When it died we didn't tell him, but Merle did. She pointed out the dry shriveled thing and said something of “early hay.” Grant laughed but
turned red as brass. He went out to dig up another, but couldn't find any more. “Why does he have to be always pulling things up and moving stuff?” Merle asked me. “Why can't he leave them alone to grow where they started? Enough things dying without his help!”