Time Is Noon (46 page)

“This granddaughter of yours is going to be a tease,” she said.

“Is she?” he answered. “Yes … Mattie isn’t so well,” he said at last, “else I’d bring the children to spend the day.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. But her eyes were watching Mary secretly. Mary was staring astonished at her own small hands, moving them this way and that. She tasted them suddenly, carefully and critically and Joan laughed. She must not miss a moment of Mary. Nothing really mattered except Mary, inquiring the universe of her two small hands.

Rob’s father hesitated. “She says you oughtn’t to take care of the children. It worries her.”

“But I
am
caring for them.” She forgot Mary and her hands. She looked at Rob’s father sharply. This was the moment she knew must come. She waited for the words shaping on his tongue.

“She—she thinks—you oughtn’t take care of them. She’s heard about your situation.”

“Did you tell her?”

“No—she heard it in the village—gossip. She came home from the missionary meeting and asked me. I told her I knew. She blamed me some for not telling her.”

She leaped to her feet. “I shall go to see her,” she cried. She wavered and sat down. “No, I won’t. You’re the one to decide, Mr. Winters. Look at me! Am I fit to have the children?”

She was begging him at first. If he denied her, then she would fight for them. The words stuck in her throat, a gorge. She shook back her hair. “Do what you like for yourself, but the children are mine,” she said loudly. “I can work to feed them—you mustn’t think of money. They’ll be happy here. Look at David!”

They looked. He was flying in from school, his black hair tumbling, his cheeks faintly red, beginning to round.

“I’m starving!” he shouted.

“There’s bread and apple butter ready in the kitchen,” she cried.

“I want to do my duty by my son’s children, Joan,” said Rob’s father gently. “I am fond of them, especially as David grows older.”

She stared at him, thinking quickly. She must think of something to force him. He was talking on. “If Mattie should feel it her duty we could find a respectable woman to help.” He was staring into the lighted lamp, talking.

“You don’t understand, Mr. Winters,” she cried. “They’re mine!”

She stopped, helpless before his stupidity. Oh, the stupidity of these good stubborn people! Her body prickled with anger. She got up and sat down again. David was coming back.

He appeared, a huge slice of bread in his hand, his mouth full. She gloated over him. She had made the good food ready, knowing this moment would come. Then she was tricky. She took him by the shoulder and held his wiry body in her arms. He did not give himself to her. He was full of impatience to be away.

“David, want to go live with your grandmother?”

They looked at each other. The boy forgot to chew in his consternation. “I won’t go.” he said. She felt his body stiffen. “I can’t go. I’d have too far to walk to school next year. I’m going to try for the junior baseball team.”

“You’ve never played baseball,” said Rob’s father mildly.

“I’ve thrown a lot of rocks,” said David hotly. “You don’t know how many rocks I’ve thrown at the people in Chito. I throw good!”

She wanted to laugh, but she must not. She said gently, releasing him, “You’re not going. Go on out and play.”

“I wouldn’t go,” he paused to tell them. “Because this is my home.”

“I don’t know where David gets his temper. Rob was so gentle,” Mr. Winters said.

“Rose was stubborn as a mule,” she answered in triumph. “You’d better leave him to me.”

They looked at each other. She kept her eyes on him, steadily, willing him. What a gentle good face he had! What troubled serious blue eyes, innocent and stubborn in goodness! She was not good, and she did not care. She would have what she wanted now. She had to make a life.

“They’d be a great trouble to you and Mrs. Winters,” she said. “Mrs. Winters is so busy in the church. And she does so much in the village. I remember how she used to do—”

“Doggone it!” he said suddenly, looking at her. She laughed. Oh, it was good to laugh. He rose, his eyes twinkling. “I’m not going to say you’re a good woman,” he protested. “You’ve run away from your husband and you don’t come to church and you’re as good as kidnapping my own son’s children.”

“Come in as often as you can,” she begged him. “And tomorrow I’ll dress the children up and bring them to see Mrs. Winters—that is, if David doesn’t have to play ball!”

He turned at the door to say, “Don’t be afraid of Mattie—I’ll tend to her.”

“I’m not afraid of anybody,” she said tranquilly.

The year flowed on into deep autumn again and there was the first frost. In the field next to her meadow her neighbor’s corn was shocked and pumpkins stood naked gold, waiting.

She lived day upon day, from end to end of every day, abandoned to each day. Never did she get up from her bed in the morning to plan, “Today I must do this and this,” nor did she ever at night say to herself, “Tomorrow …”

She lived as much a creature of the hour as any bird or beast. The hour brought its need and she fulfilled it. The pressing haste of wife and mother was not hers. She lived within no circle. No one came to her door to urge her to the church or to a meeting of the women. Because she was not in the beaten path of living they let her be, shy of what they did not understand. Neither was there anyone to cry her down, or if they did, she did not hear it and did not care.

She came and went about her business in the village as decently as any wife and they were puzzled by her decency and let her be. Only she never went into church. She could not enter it anymore. Where God had been was now only silence. Her spirit cried a truce with God.

One day there was a knock upon the door and she opened it and saw the new minister. She asked him to come in, as she asked anyone to come in who stood there, and waited for him to tell his errand.

He began brightly and quickly. “You are in my parish, Mrs. Pounder, and I have missed your face in the congregation.” She fixed her eyes on him fearlessly and strongly, and he began again. “God is ready to forgive us if we come to him.”

“Forgive?” she said clearly. “For what am I to be forgiven?”

“God …” he began, the sweat breaking out a little on his lip.

“If there were a God,” she said quietly, “I could not forgive Him.” He looked at her bewildered and went away soon. She watched him trudge down the road. I spoke exactly as Mrs. Mark would have spoken, she thought, amused.

If it had been a generation earlier she could not have lived thus freely. But the times had loosened everyone. The village paper told of strange doings in the great towns, men and women living anyhow, drunkenness and heedlessness. Automobiles began to be built in long flying lines of speed, open to the winds. They raced through the village, full of young men and women going so fast their faces could not be seen. They were blurring lines of scarlet and green and yellow and kingfisher blue, and their hair streamed behind their profiles, sharp against the sky.

One morning old Mrs. Kinney stepped from the curb. Sarah Kinney had run back for a shawl and had been slow, and old Mrs. Kinney had been provoked. She called shrilly, “Sarah, I’m going on!”

She stepped off the curb to punish Sarah, and a car tore by at her left side, threw her and went on. It was a long red car, and all the young faces were turned straight ahead and it did not stop. Miss Kinney, running out, saw no more. She screamed and ran to her mother. Old Mrs. Kinney was lying on the road, dying. But she paused long enough to say with impatience, “You’re always forgetting something.”

“I declare I miss her,” said Dr. Crabbe to Joan at the funeral. “I feel downright cheated. I believe I could have kept her going another ten years.”

Behind her black-gloved hand Miss Kinney whispered excitedly, “I’m going back to Banpu as soon as I can brush up on the language!”

But day after day passed and she did not go. “I shall begin brushing up right away,” she said gaily, and then she forgot and played in the garden among the falling leaves. They made her laugh, falling on her face, on her spraying white hair. She shook her head at them, laughing.

So Joan’s coming and going seemed gentle. Besides, she had been a child there in Middlehope. The old were growing older and they saw her still a child. “Joan will turn out all right in the end,” they said, seeing her still a small girl, wayward for a moment. But she was a woman, making her life out of what she had about her.

When she went into the store for food or clothes or shoes, the clerks greeted her as smoothly as they did another. It was true Ned Parsons was a little wary of her, kind but wary.

“What can I do for you?” He made her nameless. There was no saying “Joan”—it seemed too close now that he had two children. And Netta never quite forgot that he had once been in love with Joan Richards, or very nearly in love. She talked at night in bed against women who left their men.

“Nothing makes it right, I say,” she cried. “I’d feel it my duty to make the best of it.” She hinted against Joan. “There’s things about her I’ve never told even you—her and Martin Bradley.”

He said mildly. “I thought Martin was sweet on you once.”

But she screamed at him out of the darkness. “Me? No, thank you! I wouldn’t have married Martin Bradley if he was the last man on earth. I wouldn’t touch him or let him touch me—he gives me the creeps—always did, too! I never did understand Joan Richards—”

But Netta talked against women. She’d talk against his own sister. “There’s Emily—she’s got a good job in the city, works on a newspaper. She hasn’t anybody except herself. You’d think she’d sent Petie something. She didn’t even write when little Louise was born—People are so selfish.”

He listened. Netta talked so much. He couldn’t answer everything. He had stopped answering her years ago. His mother had been such a quiet woman, smiling and dreaming and writing her stories. They used to think her silly when they were growing up. He was glad now he had not been quite so impatient as Emily had been. Emily had said to her mother, “I don’t see how you can expect any publisher to take such drivel as you write.” But Emily was always on their father’s side. She’d get angry when they came home from school and dinner wasn’t ready and their father would be puttering distractedly about the stove, and their mother’s voice would drift down from the attic, “I’ll be right down.” But very often she wasn’t right down and Emily was angry and left home as soon as she could get a job. It seemed she was all the angrier because she herself secretly wanted to write stories and couldn’t be happy at anything else, though she always made fun of it.

But his mother never seemed to know Emily was angry. She was always quiet, thinking and smiling to herself and saying, “I really think I’ve got it this time.” A quiet woman was nice in the house …

“I’d like to see some clear blue gingham,” said Joan’s cheerful voice. Joan always had a lovely rushing voice.

“Let’s see. Netta’s just made some dresses for Louise out of this.”

“You’ve never seen my Mary’s eyes!” Joan’s voice was like laughter. “There—that sky color!” She looked just as she used to, a little heavier maybe, but she was tall. Netta was growing thinner all the time. Netta boasted, “Joan Richards—there, I forget all the time she’s married—Joan Pounder’s hair’s getting real gray. I haven’t a gray hair myself. I take after my mother. She hasn’t a gray hair at sixty!”

Joan’s smooth rosy face under soft early-graying hair—He tied up the bundle of blue gingham. “Here you are,” he said abruptly. “Anything else?”

“No, thank you, Ned!” Her voice was like singing and she walked out of the store as though she were dancing.

Ned’s getting bald, Joan thought, the blue gingham under her arm. He looks dyspeptic. I wonder if Netta’s a good cook? She thought a little tenderly of Ned’s pimpled young face, yearning at her over a guitar. It seemed very long ago. He would be ashamed now if he knew she remembered him thus. But so he had been and it made a small memory, precious, too, in its way. Everything in life that was her own now was precious. She had used to plan so much for the future, to want everything. Now she wanted only to sort out of the world that which was her own. She had only lived in Middlehope. She heard of strikes and ferment outside, of hunger marchers, of men jailed for discontent too freely spoken. A turn outward, at a moment, and she might have been one of them. But she had made the inward turn.

She was drawing near to the house and now she saw someone sitting on the stone steps of the little porch. She had left David at home to watch Mary and Paul, but this was not David. She came nearer and it was Frankie. He was sitting quietly and compactly, waiting for her, his hands in his pockets. The winter air was biting cold. She hurried toward him. “Why, Frankie!” She had not seen him in months. Fanny had come and gone irregularly. She had been away working, she said, and had taken Frank with her. She had not been to get her money for nearly a month. “Why didn’t you go in, Frankie?”

“Your boy told me to, ma’am, but I thought I’d rather wait here.”

He had grown a great deal. He was much taller than David, tall and strong, brown-skinned, dark eyes madly lashed. But his lips were like her father’s lips, purely, coldly set into the round soft oval of his face. His body was not lean and angular as David’s was. It was soft-limbed, lightly fleshed. She looked him over swiftly.

“I thought I gave Fanny money to get you some new clothes!” The boy was completely out of his clothes, his hands dangling out of his short sleeves, his trousers tight about his legs.

“I haven’t seen her, ma’am—not in a mighty long time. She went away and left us.”

“Where did she go?”

“She said she was going to New York to get a job. The factory’s closed again, ma’am. There’s a strike on again, and they aren’t going to take back any colored hands. Lem stayed a week and a day or two and he went to get a job at the pants factory in Newville he heard was looking for help.”

“Where have you been all this time?”

“Waiting—waiting for her to come back. She told me to wait. But I finished up everything to eat in the house.”