Time Is Noon (44 page)

Under the speed of the days went the knowledge of this silver thread weaving between her and Roger Bair. His letter came back to her quickly, immediate, sure. She knew his handwriting, which she had never seen, small, clear, square letters, free of each other, each standing independent in its shape. It was a cool letter, a letter wary of feeling, ready to help her at a distance. He had talked with her brother, he wrote, as to what she was able to do. Her brother had remembered she used to write music, that she and Martin Bradley had worked at music together. He remembered Bradley as an uncommonly gifted fellow in that way. He had called Bradley at his office and got suggestions. Bradley said one could do music writing for a music publishing firm—make orchestrations, set in harmonies melodies others had made—hack stuff in a way, but she could do it at home. Bradley had given him the name of a firm and he had been to see them and they were sending some things for her to try out.

She read the letter. It was long and closely written, but all concerning his errand, all except the last line about Francis—“Your brother is a good flier.”

But at that moment it did not matter about Francis. Francis was not between them. There was something else. She must sweep Martin Bradley away from between them. She made haste to write to him. “I do not want to accept anything from Martin Bradley—nothing at all. Do not mention my name to him. I will accept only from you.”

She wrote to him freely, not caring what he thought. He must know her from the beginning as she was. If she were free, then she was free. She would be nothing but herself. His letter came back again, immediate. “It is I who am doing this for you. I have mentioned your name to no one.”

So their letters came and went, a bright warp and woof beneath her days. Under all that she had to do was this silver weaving back and forth between her and Roger Bair, a strong bright fabric underlying her whole life.

She saw it there, silver as the meshed steel of armor. It spread under her and around her, to save her and to make her strong.

On the fourth of October, John Stuart was to bring Rose’s children home. She was making yellow curtains. She had been restless without them, seeing them inevitable against the smoke-dark plaster walls of the kitchen until, feeling as guilty as though she were robbing a till, she took two dollars of her money and went to Mr. Winters’ store. “I want the brightest yellow stuff you have,” she said to Mr. Winters. He was behind the counter, his pencil over his ear. He had grown very thin and stooped and looked continually dazed. More than ever he forgot where things were.

“Let me see,” he pondered. He ran his fingers down a pile of bright ginghams.

“I see it—there!” she cried. His finger halted and he pulled out a bolt of gold and threw it before her. She watched him greedily as he measured it off, the precious stuff she had no right to buy, not with Fanny coming now to her door every Saturday, complaining, “Frankie’s grown right out of himself now, Miss Joan. He’s got to have a new suit of clothes.” Fanny had accepted with placidity the change in meeting place. “Yes, lots of ladies just can’t stand their men, I reckon. I get that way myself sometimes. Lem’s awful to live with steady. I reckon every man is.” No, she had no right to the yellow stuff, brought for beauty against a dark wall.

“The children come the fourth of October,” said Mr. Winters abruptly, his scissors sliding down the cloth. “Seven o’clock train.”

“I’ve been waiting to hear,” she said. “I’m longing for them.”

“If Mattie had her health,” said Mr. Winters gloomily above the bright stuff, “Rob’s children would be with his father and mother. I always wanted more children. But she didn’t want to go through with it. After our girl died she said she wouldn’t go through with it.”

“I’m all ready for them,” Joan said. “You shall see them often. You can come and see them. I’m living in Mrs. Mark’s little house, you know.”

“Are you, now?” he said. He was folding the stuff and she saw he did not know she was living alone and she did not tell him. Time enough for that when the moment came. Time enough when she must hear Mrs. Winters cry out, “But you’re doing a sinful thing, Joan!” She must have the children first, safe under the roof.

Looking at Mr. Winters’ thin gray face she was sorry for him. The rest of his life he would be living with his old wife in their little square house on the village street, quite alone. She must take the children there often. She was so rich in all her children. “I’m going to bring them up often to see you,” she said.

But he did not smile. He shook his head, sighing. “It oughtn’t ever to have been like this. It doesn’t seem as if we deserve it—God-fearing people,” he muttered.

“No,” she agreed. “Well, anyway, there are the children.”

“I set my heart on Rob from the day he was born,” he said.

She touched his withering hand before she went away. The skin was hard and dry and cold.

She took the stuff back and cut it and hung it in strips of yellow light. Even Paul turned at it. He could really walk alone a little now—if she put him on his feet. He held his head up a moment, staring at the yellow curtains. His eyes slipped away, and came wandering back again to their brightness. It had been right to buy them, after all.

Then she had her own letter from John Stuart. She looked up over the table next morning when she was ironing Paul’s clothes and there between the curtains she saw Bart coming down the path. Her heart stopped. He had found her, then. Of course she knew she would be found. She was frightened, for a moment. He looked huge and strong in his work clothes, standing outside the door. He rattled the latch and lifted it and stood there in the open doorway. She looked at him, her body calm and straight, imprisoning her frightened, flying heart.

“Well, Bart?” she said pleasantly, sturdily. She held hard to the hot iron. A hot iron was a good thing to hold, if she needed it.

“I knew a week ago you were here,” he said sullenly. She ironed busily, meticulous about the small belt.

“I haven’t hidden it,” she said cheerfully.

He fumbled in his pocket. “Here are two letters that came for you.”

“Put them there on the windowsill,” she said. Her heart was quieting now, like a wild bird gaining hope. She need not be afraid of him. He did not know what to say to her, what to do with her. She was stronger than he.

“Aren’t you coming back?” he asked, watching her iron. She began to fold the little garment, but the iron was there, ready, hot.

“No, Bart. I’m never coming back,” she answered.

“We never did anything to you. We were good to you,” he said after a moment.

“I don’t complain, Bart,” she said cheerfully.

He waited, his slow brain searching. “Ma means well,” he said at last. “It’s her way.”

“I know,” she said. She unrolled another garment and worked steadily on.

“I don’t give anything for that—that Snade girl.”

“That’s all right, Bart,” she said quickly. “Don’t talk about her.”

“If you’d come back,” he said heavily, “I’d forget her easily. A fellow doesn’t mean anything. She hung around the barn a lot.”

“Don’t,” she said. “I don’t care.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

He pondered, leaning against the doorway. She ironed, longing fiercely that he would go away. What was this power of shadow which one creature could cast over another, merely by his dull being? But she was not afraid anymore. She would not need the iron. She could set it away.

“You never did care about me, Jo. I’ll never get over liking you—loving you.”

“I did wrong to marry you, Bart. I see that. You would have been really happy with someone else—maybe with her. I’m going to set it right.”

“I’d rather you came back. I liked it the way it was before the kid came. You acted happy enough then.”

She did not answer. She was putting things away, setting the room straight. She fetched some carrots to cook for Paul’s dinner and began washing them. She watched their color come clean and clear out of the water—a pure deep color. It was beautiful the way color came out everywhere, out of the mud of the earth. The carrot was a shape of color between her fingers, mysteriously made … He was standing there endlessly and she could not forget him. She was mad to have him gone and the doorway empty to the sky. She fixed her mind steadily upon the carrot, slicing it firmly.

“You’re not coming back, sure enough, Jo?” he asked helplessly.

Now she knew, quite simply, that if she had again to lie beside his great body she would kill herself. Pain and hurt, right or wrong, there was something still beyond these. Her body could not again be subject when her mind, her heart, revolted. She would kill her body and set herself free. She began to tremble.

“No, never, Bart.”

“Gee,” he muttered, “Ma and Pop’ll never get over it—never get over the talk.”

“I can’t live to save them from that, Bart.”

“You sure?”

“So sure I’m going to ask you to bring the trunk with my things.”

He spat in the dust by the door and wiped his enormous hand across his mouth. He was in deep distress, she could see. She was sorry for him. He was suffering in his way. But he had not mentioned Paul’s name. He began to talk again sullenly, scuffing the thick toe of his shoe against the threshold. “You act so high and mighty. But Ma says the kid’s your fault. Your old man was crazy—everybody knew he was—”

“Go home, Bart,” she said, steadily. “I don’t want you here. I’m happier when you are not here.”

He looked at her bewildered. But now she was trembling very much. Her head whirled with giddiness.

“If you don’t go away at once,” she said clearly, “I shall take Paul and go where you can never find us. I’ll do that even if it is at the bottom of some river.”

“Gee,” he muttered. “I’m not hurting you—”

“Go—go—” she said tensely, her eyes forcing him, her will pushing him. He stared at her, and went slowly down the path. Not until the gate slammed, not until the air was cleared where he had stood, could she quiet her trembling. Let her forget—let her think of lovely shapes and colors, growing out of the earth. Let her never remember Bart and those years—or anything he had ever said.

Through the open door she could see the long lovely flowing together of the undulating hills. The sky was cloudless and the breeze was stealing in about her, pure and mild as the water in a sunny stream, as cleansing.

After a while, when her body was still, she opened the letters. One was from John Stuart, telling her when he was coming. “Dear Madam,” he began formally. David was well. But the baby, Mary, had been ill. The artificial food had not nourished her. He had done the best he could, but she cried incessantly. Yet when she ate, she was ill. It was difficult to understand God’s purpose.

The other was from Francis, a few scratched lines. His handwriting was exactly what it had been when he was a boy in school, loose, nervous, irregular.

It’s too bad about Rose and Rob. But I can hardly remember Rose, somehow. She was the only one of us that did what she wanted, but she got killed for it. That’s life for you. I’m going on regular flying as soon as there’s a vacancy.

She read the letters through and tore them up. Bart had touched them, he had taken them from his pocket. She rose and washed her hands. Then she went upstairs and planned. Here there must be a bed for David. She must buy a table and a chair. But she could take a little of her own money now. Yesterday the score had come from the music publishers and it was not too difficult to do. She dared to buy a bed for David and a crib for Mary to lie beside her.

The future was warm about her again. Bart was walking down the road, away from her, his figure smaller each moment that she planned. She was making her life, shaping it about the children. One had to take life and make it, gather it from here and there—yellow curtains, carrots, a bed for a little boy, milk for a sick baby, sheets of music to write, her unfinished child, a house—out of such and everything she would make her life. And underneath was the strong sustaining web of love unspoken. What if it were unspoken and unreturned? A phrase came flying out of her childhood, her father, from the pulpit, reading, “And underneath us are the everlasting arms.” She had caught the phrase then because it was lovely, listening to him idly in the careless fullness of her childhood. But now when all childhood was gone she could take the beautiful words, like an empty cup, and fill them to the brim with her own meaning, her own secret meaning.

In the dusky October evening they stood waiting at the train, she and Mr. and Mrs. Winters. She had forced herself to learn to leave Paul alone sometimes. It was not very far, not really. The house stood just beyond the village, and if she put him on a quilt upon the floor and locked the door, he must be safe. But even so, she left her heart behind to guard him, and now she stood impatiently.

They were silent and somehow forlorn in the dusk, the three of them. “If I’d been listened to at first,” Mrs. Winters said now and then, but Mr. Winters said nothing at all and Joan could not talk for thinking of Rose. Rose had gone away so sure of God’s will. But she was not saved alive. The train came whistling and pounding in, and paused a second at the wayside station. It was a great through train that did not commonly stop at a small place unless someone asked it, and that was seldom. But it stopped to bring home from very far this tall stooping gray-haired young man, holding in his arms a wailing baby. Beside him, clinging to his coat, was a small thin boy in a brown cloth suit, looking in steadfast silence at all he saw. They stood far down upon the platform, their few worn bags about them. Joan saw them first and went running.

“Oh, give me the precious little thing!”

She took her from him, this fragment from Rose, this child her sister Rose had given her. It was unutterable comfort to hold her close at last. “You’re home, my darling,” she murmured. “David, my darling, you’re home. Oh, how tired you all look!”

“To the bone,” the man said. He gave her the baby but he still clung to David’s hand.

“Well, well,” Mr. Winters was saying. “Well, here you are.”